Free Republic

Legislature approves health care coverage as constitutional right By Jennifer Peter, Associated Press, 16:25 BOSTON (AP) Comprehensive and affordable health care coverage would become a constitutionally-protected right for all Massachusetts citizens under an amendment overwhelming approved Wednesday by a joint session of the House and Senate. If approved by lawmakers again during the 2005-2006 session, the question would go before voters in November 2006. If successful, the state would then develop a specific plan for providing and paying for health care. Under a change approved Wednesday, which made the amendment more palatable to some lawmakers, the payment and coverage plan...

Ex-Gov. Lamm says 'retiring the baby boomers' will force care system to adaptFormer Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm has been one of the sharpest critics of the U.S. health-care system for more than 20 years, and in his new book, The Brave New World of Health Care, he lays out his critique in its most complete form yet. For all its technological marvels, he says, American health care is "unsustainable, unaffordable, and inequitable, and needs to be substantially amended and revised." Lamm was interviewed by Vincent Carroll, editor of the editorial pages. The interview has been edited for length and clarity....

Ever since the Clinton administration's proposal to direct America's health-care system from Washington, D.C., went down in ignominious defeat a decade ago, its chief architect, Hillary Rodham Clinton, has shied away from "comprehensive health care reform." That is, until now. Breaking what must have been a difficult ten-year silence, Sen. Clinton (D., N.Y.) recently asked on the cover of The New York Times Magazine, "Now Can We Talk About Health Care?" Without waiting for an answer, she called for "a new social contract for a new century premised on joint responsibility to prevent disease and provide those who need...

Free Market Medicine Last week the congressional Joint Economic committee on which I serve held a hearing featuring two courageous medical doctors. I had the pleasure of meeting with one of the witnesses, Dr. Robert Berry, who opened a low-cost health clinic in rural Tennessee. His clinic does not accept insurance, Medicare, or Medicaid, which allows Dr. Berry to treat patients without interference from third-party government bureaucrats or HMO administrators. In other words, Dr. Berry practices medicine as most doctors did 40 years ago, when patients paid cash for ordinary services and had inexpensive catastrophic insurance for serious injuries or...

The latest obsession of politicians enamored with the Canadian health-care system has been the availability of cheaper prescription drugs north of the border. But calls for a nationalized health-care system like Canada's have quieted down of late, and no wonder. A Wall Street Journal article last week examined the wait times for everything from appointments with a specialist to cardiac surgery. And they aren't pretty. Health outcomes as a whole in Canada are in league with those of the United States and a Canadian's life expectancy is actually slightly longer (79.4 years versus 76.8 years). That likely has more to...

Fake blood gets woman hernia op A woman mixed cranberry juice with crumbled biscuits to simulate her own blood and get herself admitted to hospital. Trizka Litton phoned 999 and called an ambulance, claiming to have vomited blood. She was admitted to Walsgrave Hospital, Coventry, where she underwent surgery to correct a serious hiatus hernia. Mrs Litton said she had no choice as she had been waiting seven months for an operation. I still don't know what came over me or how I could have even thought of cooking up such a preposterous plot. Trizka Litton She told The...

OCA RATON, Fla. — It is lunchtime, and the door to Boca Urology's office is locked. But outside, patients are milling about, calling the office on their cellphones, hoping the receptionist will let them in. To say they are eager hardly does them justice. "We never used to lock the door at lunch, but they came in an hour early," said Ellie Fertel, the office manager. "It's like they're waiting for a concert. Sometimes we forget to lock the door and they come in and sit in the dark." Yet few have serious medical problems, let alone emergencies. "It's the...

Drs. Michael A. Glueck & Robert J. Cihak Medical mischief http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | Why do human beings co-operate in their own destruction? The question has been asked many times, about many human disasters - from great republics whose citizens surrendered their liberties - to innocents who walked into gas chambers. Many answers have been adduced: inability to resist, fatalism, the belief that some emergencies require stern but "temporary" measures. But perhaps the most common reason why people choose slavery is the belief that - despite all the evidence of history and all the force of logic and common sense - they're...

Britain shamed by NHS death rates Waiting lists and shortage of doctors blamed for grim mortality figures Jo Revill, health editorSunday September 7, 2003The Observer Patients who have major surgery in Britain are four times more likely to die than those in America, according to a major new study. The comparison of care, which reveals a sevenfold difference in mortality rates in one set of patients, concludes that hospital waiting lists, a shortage of specialists and competition for intensive care beds are to blame. Fresh evidence of a stark contrast between the fate of patients on either side of the...

Britain shamed by NHS death rates Waiting lists and shortage of doctors blamed for grim mortality figures Jo Revill, health editor Sunday September 7, 2003 The Observer Patients who have major surgery in Britain are four times more likely to die than those in America, according to a major new study. The comparison of care, which reveals a sevenfold difference in mortality rates in one set of patients, concludes that hospital waiting lists, a shortage of specialists and competition for intensive care beds are to blame. Fresh evidence of a stark contrast between the fate of patients on either side...

Young Americans: Pay Attention, Or Pay The Bills by Derek Hunter August 19, 2003 | | If you’re in your 20s or 30s, one of the biggest decisions affecting your life likely will be made this fall. It’s not whether to get married. Or to buy a house. Or even to have and educate children. But it’s a decision that could affect your ability to afford any or all of those things. That decision, which will be made by Congress, is whether or not to give senior citizens, regardless of income or need, a prescription-drug entitlement in Medicare. The House...

Health care's hidden costs Pierre Lemieux Financial Post Thursday, August 28, 2003 Socialist systems are especially efficient at hiding costs. Workers and producers are underpaid by the state. Economist Mancur Olson has demonstrated Stalin's genius at devising remuneration systems that encouraged people to work hard for mere subsistence wages. Also, in a socialist system, consumers spend much time in queues, sacrificing valued leisure or income, which is a real cost. What does this have to do with Canada? An article in last week's New England Journal of Medicine by a group of American and Canadian health experts (Woolhandler et al.)...

Last Thursday, the New England Journal of Medicine published an article stating that administrative costs of health care in the United States are higher than those in Canada: $1,059 (U.S.) in the United States versus $307 (U.S.) in Canada. The lead author, professor Steffi Woolhandler of Harvard Medical School, has written similar articles over the years, all with the conclusion that the United States should embrace government-monopoly health insurance like we have in Canada.As the authors note, American patients, doctors, and hospitals have to deal with multiple insurers, each of which has different policies and paperwork.In Canada, patients only have...

WASHINGTON, Aug. 14 (UPI) -- There is broad agreement that the Medicare system is inadequate for its purpose. The current population of seniors and rapidly aging baby boomers constitute more people living longer than the program's designers contemplated when it first went online in 1965. Before leaving town for the summer recess, the U.S. Congress made considerable progress toward legislation changing this almost 40-year-old program. The Medicare reform package is currently in the hands of a congressional conference committee that must synthesize the bills already passed by the House and Senate into one proposal. What the conferees have are a...

Newt Gingrich urged Congress on Tuesday to use negotiations over a Medicare prescription drug benefit as a step toward transforming the nation's entire health care system. Since a federal plan to help seniors pay for prescription drugs is ``the largest single domestic program change since Lyndon Johnson's 'Great Society' of 1965,'' the former House Speaker said, ``anything less than this effort will lead to a politically and financially unsustainable outcome.'' With Congress in recess, House and Senate staffers are hammering out differences in versions of the Medicare prescription benefit. President Bush has urged Congress to pass such a measure and...

LONDON -- Remember Pushme-Pullyu? That was the llama with a head at both ends, from the "Dr. Dolittle" stories by the British-born Hugh Lofting. The creature could get along just fine in the 1967 and 1998 movies starring Rex Harrison and Eddie Murphy, but in the real world, of course, such an absurd critter has never existed -- unless one counts the forward-backward creature known as socialism, in which things are free but are often not available. Alas, the pushme-pullyu paradox of socialism is not confined to faraway areas. Practical-minded Americans, for example, might consider themselves to be immune to...

This Could Cost You an Arm and a Leg Exclusive commentary by Beverly B. Nuckols, MD Aug 19, 2003 Once again, a very small minority is pushing universal health care, after the style of the Canadian Medicare System, as reported in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in their August 13, 2003 issue. Everyone who does not want to receive the "benefits" of one size fits all medicine and healthcare must speak up, now. We’d better, because the leaders of medical organizations other than the AMA and the small group mentioned above are also pushing for “universal access,”...

ASHINGTON, Aug. 18 — President Bush and Congress have agreed to spend $400 billion on prescription drugs for the elderly over 10 years. But they rarely address a basic question: Where does the money come from?It will be borrowed from the public, officials say. In practice, economists say, workers of the future — children and grandchildren of today's Medicare beneficiaries — will have to pay much of the cost through higher taxes.The federal government has no budget surplus to pay for the new benefits, which are the biggest expansion of Medicare since its creation in 1965. A law that required...

IRRESPONSIBLY, Congress is treating the lack of prescription-drug insurance among some seniors as if it were as common to old age as gray hair. In reality, 76 percent of seniors currently have pharmaceutical coverage. Rather than target assistance to the remaining 24 percent of seniors, the GOP Congress is crafting a Medicare reform package that President Bush is desperate to sign. This brand-new entitlement — estimated 10-year cost: $400 billion — looks frighteningly like something hammered together by Lyndon Johnson. All Americans over 65 could participate, even multi-millionaires who already have drug coverage. To prevent Bush from using this surgical-strength...

<p>Why can't Americans have the same health care coverage as Congress?</p> <p>Our solons are just now scattered around the country far from the Beltway conventional wisdom, so they may be in an educable mood. If you have the opportunity, dear reader, sidle up to a Congressperson and ask: On this health care business, why not give the rest of us the same choices you've given yourself?</p>

Bus travelers bring the reality of rationed health care and price-controlled drugs over the border Another one rides the bus A week before Independence Day, 37-year-old Debbie Thomas(1) found herself on a bus headed over the border to seek medications. This was not, however, one of the highly publicized stories of Americans going to Canada to buy cut-rate prescriptions. This bus was headed the other way, from New Brunswick to Bangor, Maine, USA, and all 20 passengers were Canadians. A man suffering chest pain sought an echocardiogram, a procedure his Canadian doctor deemed necessary but couldn’t deliver until nearly four...

The Wonders of Socialized Medicine, the Horrors of British Teeth We have to salute the New York Times, for a change. Though it frequently agitates for the feds to impose socialized medicine on Americans, it is honest enough to expose the nightmare of the United Kingdom's government health system. In one of the funniest episodes of "The Simpsons," a deranged dentist terrifies children into brushing and flossing by forcing them to page through a ghastly "Big Book of British Smiles." Americans have long wondered why our English friends have such horrible teeth. Even the likes of Tony Blair and Prince...

The Washington Post ran a front-page story the other day about the "health gap" between Eastern and Western Europe. "As Hungary and nine other countries prepare to join the European Union next May, the bloc's leaders are paying much attention to closing the ‘wealth gap' between the low-income, former communist East and the affluent West. But little has been said about the equally wide ‘health gap.' ... Hungary ranked first in the world for the rate of cancer deaths among men and women in 2000, according to the American Cancer Society. For men, the other Eastern European countries held the...

Nearly 9,000 doctors, including two former U.S. surgeons general and a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, have signed on to a drive to create a Canadian-style national health insurance system. A group of top doctors led by Chicago doctor Dr. Quentin Young, a longtime advocate of national health insurance, drafted a proposal published in today's edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association, one of the country's top medical journals. They are reigniting a decadelong battle and opposition remains intense. Despite publishing the article, the American Medical Association is opposed to universal health care and...

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) -- Nearly 8,000 U.S. physicians are calling for government-financed national health insurance, which they say would cover every American while saving billions of dollars.</p> <p>Ten years after President Clinton's national health plan died in Congress, tangled in complexity and under fierce assault from the medical, insurance and pharmaceutical industries, the doctors argue that private sector solutions have failed.</p>

SEATTLE - All of us want extra attention from our doctors, we want to get in to see them quicker, and we'd love more one-on-one time when we're sick. Now, you can get that -- if you pay a special fee. But now, the state is trying to figure out if that fee is legal. Insurance paid for Meg Clara's major back surgery. But she pays extra to get extra attention from her doctor. A monthly $25 access fee on top of her insurance premiums buys her extra perks. "Longer appointments, more timely appointments, providing emergency care on site when...

WASHINGTON -- Aug-12 -- (CongressDaily) A government-funded, privately administered health insurance program that would cover all Americans is the only system that can constrain healthcare costs while expanding coverage, a group of physicians said today. In an article to be published in Wednesday's edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association, 7,782 physicians are proposing replacing the current privately funded healthcare system with a "single payer" structure in which the government would provide universal health insurance, a model used in many other countries where per capita health spending is much lower than in the United States. The plan would...

Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) recently became the first presidential candidate in U.S. history to propose solving the problem of the uninsured by making health insurance mandatory. Although his proposed health-care mandate is limited to children and young people, all under age 21, it offers the most promising way forward for eventually covering all 41 million uninsured Americans, and it marks a major turning point in our nation's health-care debate. The United States spends more on health care per capita than any other nation, yet one in seven of our citizens, and 12 million children, still lack basic health insurance. There...

Comments Spark Debate on Fairness Between Generations The head of the youth group of Germany's Christian Democrats has sparked a controversial debate on aging, the country’s cash-strapped social security system and whether it can afford hip replacements for pensioners. Never before has a 23 year-old caused such a commotion in German politics. Germany's social system is "not responsible for making every senior citizen fit for a pensioner's adventure holiday," said Philipp Missfelder, head of the conservative opposition’s youth outfit the Junge Union. The up-and-coming politician told the Berlin daily Tagesspiegel earlier this week that senior citizens over the age of...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. Report says higher premiums force more plan revisions As health care costs skyrocket and the economy lags, employers are shifting more of the burden to workers, requiring them to pay higher premiums, deductibles and co-payments while wages remain stagnant. One-third of companies responding to a local business survey said they substantially revised employee health care benefits as a result of increasing premiums in the past year. Nearly 70 percent said the probability was "somewhat likely" to "very likely" that they would substantially revise their coverage plan as premiums continue to rise....

Should the federal government require all Americans to buy private health insurance? This intriguing proposal is being pushed by the New America Foundation, a liberal policy shop in Washington, D.C. "Universal coverage in exchange for universal responsibility," is how the NAF characterizes it. Before rejecting the proposal out of hand, stop and consider that it may be a second-best alternative for relieving the growing political pressure to create some sort of nationalized single-payer health care system modeled on the nearly bankrupt and increasingly shabby health care schemes in Canada and Western Europe. Make no mistake about it—private health care is...

<p>Some conservative lawmakers say they expect support for the Medicare prescription drug legislation currently in House-Senate conference will crumble over the August recess, allowing them to push key changes when Congress returns in the fall.</p> <p>"It is my fondest hope that the American people will let their elected representatives know what they think of a massive new entitlement," said Rep. Mike Pence, an Indiana Republican who voted against the House Medicare prescription drug bill.</p>

Patients left as doctors push trolleys Hospitals 'waste night staff time on menial jobs' Jo Revill, health editor Sunday August 3, 2003 The Observer Hard-pressed hospital doctors working at night have to waste up to a third of their time answering bleepers unnecessarily, hunting down missing x-rays and pushing patients on trolleys, a major new survey reveals. The Department of Health and the British Medical Association are astonished by the results of the first authoritative survey on the issue, which shows enormous mismanagement of junior medics' hours, even as the NHS is recruiting abroad to fill a staff shortage. Instead...

As the issue of prescription-drug pricing heats up south of the border, two questions come to mind. First, why should U.S. patients pay exorbitant prices for their medicines while heath-care systems in other developed countries — Canada most notably — get their medications at cut-rate prices, and thereby avoid paying their fair share of drug R&D costs? Second, why would U.S. drug companies continue to ship us their pills, capsules and serums if those products are then being "reimported" right back into the United States at the same low prices? The short answers are: They shouldn't and they won't. As...

In late June, the Business Roundtable enthusiastically endorsed the plan to add a prescription drug benefit to Medicare. Normally, you'd think that the white-hot center of the industrial establishment would oppose the creation of an open-ended entitlement that will cost at least $400 billion over 10 years. After all, big business has historically cried "Socialism!" when Congress enacted safety net programs such as Social Security and Medicaid. But these days self-interest trumps ideology. Many large employers would love to dump the burden of buying drugs for their retirees onto the federal government. (A study by the Congressional Budget Office determined...

Rhonda Pickering's 13-year-old daughter needs six teeth pulled to make way for braces. The substitute teacher was planning to tap her Florida Healthy Kids low-cost insurance to pay for the extractions and orthodontia. But during a recent visit to the dentist, she discovered that state legislators had capped dental benefits to help slash the state budget. Now, only $750 of dental work is covered annually, which rarely covers more than cleanings, X-rays and fillings. "Talk about a slap in the face," the Orlando woman said. "I was happy to get this kind of coverage, and then you yank it away."...

Jul. 27, 2003 Health care system shake-up More fees for patients and reduced services - with more changes likely to follow By Kristina Merkner It's a rare case in German politics: Even before it reached parliament, all the parties have signaled support for an agreement struck between the government and the opposition on how to reform Germany's public health care system. Maybe the incentive to stick together was to have someone to share the blame with: The 92 percent of the population that belongs to the public health funds, or Krankenkassen, now face reduced services and, in case of illness,...

Fiscal Situation Causes States to Reconsider Medicaid Services 7/24/03 9:23:00 PM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: National and State desks Contact: Gene Rose of the National Conference of State Legislatures, 415-905-1020 (until July 25) or 303-856-1518; Web: http://www.ncsl.org SAN FRANCISCO, July 24 /U.S. Newswire/ -- At a time when the faltering economy is adding to the ranks of the needy, in some states you'll have to be poorer in 2004 to qualify for Medicaid than you did two years ago. Cash-strapped states are struggling to cover as many people and services with this program as they did in the 1990s. A new...

CANADIANS HEAD TO MAINE FOR MEDICAL TREATMENT Normally when you hear about bus trips between Maine and Canada related to health care, it's Mainers going north to buy prescription drugs. But right about now, a group of Canadians is in Bangor for treatment. Twelve Canadians came south for a similar trip last year. The trip from New Brunswick is sponsored by a Canadian consumer group which says Canada's universal health care system restricts many forms of treatment for Canadians, and forces long waits for tests and procedures such as m-r-i's. The Canadians will be treated in Bangor this afternoon,...

Apparently, buses filled with people looking for prescription drugs run not only to Canada, but run in the opposite direction. That will become clear Thursday, when a bus with about 15 people will leave St. John, New Brunswick, headed for drugstores and doctors' offices in Bangor. Most of the attention is focused on buses running the other way, filled with people who say price-controlled drugs in Canada are much less expensive than the same medications in the United States. Thursday's trip is being organized by Consumer Advocare Network in Toronto, which has been pushing for reform of Canada's single-payer health-care...

Germany slashes health costs The German government reached a landmark deal with opposition parties on Monday to trim Germany's costly health care system, in a move which could hurt drugmakers but should help resuscitate Europe's largest economy. The agreement forces patients to pay more for drugs and treatment and reduces insurance cover for services the ageing population had taken for granted, such as taxi fares to hospital. It will yield 9.9 billion euros in savings next year rising to 23.1 billion euros by 2007. Germans pay more for health care than any other nation apart from the United States and...

WASHINGTON, July 21 — A bill that would make it easier for Americans to import inexpensive prescription medicines from Canada and Europe is gathering support among some Republicans in the House of Representatives, prompting a furious effort by the pharmaceutical industry to defeat the legislation when it comes up for a vote later this week. The so-called "reimportation" bill, which would legalize the importation of drugs already sold in the United States, does not have the support of House Republican leaders. They are bringing it up for consideration as part of a deal they struck with a Missouri Republican, Representative...

Rep. John D. Dingell, a Democratic titan from Michigan who is proud of the vote he cast 38 years ago to create Medicare, is upset about changes included in one of the congressional plans to add a prescription drug benefit to the program. When negotiators sat down for the first time last week to iron out differences in separate House and Senate Medicare measures, Dingell went straight to his concerns. Speaking of the House plan, the 77-year-old lawmaker said: "It not only privatizes a watered-down drug benefit, it privatizes the entire Medicare program in seven years." Political and policy analysts...

Millions of seniors stand to lose their private employer-based drug coverage or find that their existing drug coverage is significantly scaled back from what it is today. That is the likely result if provisions in major Medicare legislation recently approved by both houses of Congress (S. 1 and H.R. 1) to provide all Medicare beneficiaries with a new Medicare prescription drug benefit are approved in their current form. A House-Senate conference committee is now attempting to reconcile the differences between the two massive bills. Rather than reconciling two profoundly flawed bills, however, the conferees should go back to the drawing...

<p>House conservatives are furious at one of their usual allies &#8212; the pro-life Traditional Values Coalition &#8212; for waging a campaign to convince people that a bill allowing reimportation of American-made drugs from other countries promotes abortion.</p> <p>The TVC says the bill &#8212; set for a House vote next week &#8212; "creates a fast track for the deadly abortion drug RU-486." In an attempt to derail it, the conservative, pro-family group has run numerous ads, organized phone calls and sent mass mailings to constituents of many pro-life representatives, urging them to tell their congressmen the bill is "wrong for the unborn."</p>

Whenever Congress writes major legislation, lobbyists circle to get their industry or group favorably included in the final bill. The $400 billion Medicare prescription drug bill is no exception. Of the Senate's 1,043-page version of the bill, about one-fifth of the pages reportedly are proposed changes to the Medicare program that have little to do with the new drug benefit. According to reports in the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, lobbyists succeeded in inserting a number of changes in the Senate bill in the early morning hours just before passage on June 27. The House version made certain that...

<p>House Majority Leader Tom DeLay yesterday drew a line in the sand by saying, hours before the Medicare conference committee opened, that House Republicans will not accept a bill that doesn't force Medicare to compete directly with private health care plans by 2010.</p>

As Congress fights over health care coverage, the public is expressing support for private sector options. A recent Zogby poll reveals that --82% of all voters surveyed and 67% of seniors agree that “seniors should have the option of picking a private health plan approved by the Medicare program to provide their health benefits.” --Only 16% of seniors believe that the Senate drug plan would be better than the one they have, while 74% said no. --Only 42% of seniors without drug coverage said they would be likely to buy the new policy. --66% fear that a government-controlled prescription drug...

<p>The Senate is poised to add a prescription drug benefit to Medicare, the government program that covers health care costs for 40 million elderly and disabled Americans.</p> <p>While this is welcome news to some seniors, there is one thing the 78 percent of seniors who already have prescription drug coverage should know: If the Prescription Drug and Medicare Improvement Act of 2003 becomes law, there will be no reason for their former employers to continue to offer prescription drug coverage.</p>

In a late-night vote last week, the Republican congress managed to do what Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy tried to do ten years ago: take the next big step toward socialized medicine in America. More specifically, Congress voted for a huge expansion of Medicare that enriches pharmaceutical companies, fleeces taxpayers with billions in new spending, and forces millions of seniors to accept inferior drug coverage. Conservatives might ask themselves whether this is what they had in mind when the party of “limited government” gained control of the House, Senate, and White House. Seniors have been terribly misled about this new...