healthcare reform

Ok, maybe I’m being a bit extreme but I am getting really, really tired of the rhetoric I’m hearing now about the horrors of the 2010 health care reform bill. I’m just going to bet that most of the people trashing it don’t have the slightest clue what it means and what it includes and what it could do.

Is it perfect?

Absolutely not.

But then, the only perfect things in this world are a newborn baby and the fois gras with sauteed apples I had for dinner last Saturday night (oh, and the Penfolds Grange wine my husband surprised me with on our 15th anniversary).

I’m not going to autopsy the health care reform bill here now (It’s nearly midnight and I really need to get to bed). However, I just wrote an article about the costs of treating rheumatoid arthritis and what health care reform might mean for the millions of people in this country with the disease. It will appear at www.lifescript.com in the next week or two. In the meantime, however, I think that what I’ve written applies to any person with any chronic health condition, whether it’s depression or cancer. In a nutshell, the bill … Continue Reading

My alarm clock  is set to “radio” and my radio is set to the local NPR station. Now, I’m not one of those people who leaps out of bed when the alarm goes off. Instead, I lie in bed slowly waking up to about 15 or 20 minutes of the morning news. This morning however, the news just made me want to pull the covers over my head and never get out of bed. That’s because the focus was healthcare reform, and the amount of misinformation and, yes, I have to say it, stupidity out there about what the current proposals will or won’t do is making me literally sick to my stomach.

And then there’s what my own state–Virginia–has done. For those of you who eschew the news (and you’re pretty smart to do that these days given how depressing it is) the Virginia General Assembly passed–and the governor promises to sign–a bill authorizing the Attorney General and his staff to assist Virginians who want to opt out of mandatory health insurance, should health reform pass. In other words, the state that is … Continue Reading

$2600. $544.

Look carefully at those two numbers. The first is the sum of three bills I received for my husband’s day-after-Christmas visit to the emergency room for unusual dizziness. A CT and EKG ruled out a stroke or heart attack. Diagnosis? Vertigo.

(Note: both figures will likely be much higher once all the bills come in, but I needed a blog post so I’m going with what I’ve got now).

Now look at the second figure. That’s what I have to pay after the discounts my insurance company has negotiated with the hospital and radiologists. Note: there are no payments from the insurance company in there because we had not yet met our deductible. These are just the discounts.

Which points out a really critical issue when it comes to those who have health insurance and those who don’t. Merely by having health insurance–even before my insurance company spends a single cent on my medical care–I benefit. I benefit from the administrators who go to the hospitals and doctors and negotiate deep discounts in exchange for funneling more volume (i.e., patients) … Continue Reading

Ok, yes, the Democrats just lost their filibuster-proof majority. Politics, politics, politics.

Can we please focus on what’s really important here, people, which is not seeing who can pee further. It is providing health insurance for more than 35 million people and taking the first baby steps towards fixing our mess-of-a-healthcare system.

One statistic and then I’ll stop ranting: An estimated 17,000 children in the United States might have died unnecessarily over nearly two decades because they didn’t have health insurance, according to a report from researchers at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center in Baltimore.

Ok, now you Senators can start peeing again.