public option ping pong. lieberman intercepts.

by: los anjalis

Wed Oct 28, 2009 at 08:00:00 AM PDT

As always, a pleasure to see both of these brilliant women talk this out.  And yes...

How to explain the public option for healthcare reform, reprise

by: los anjalis

Mon Sep 14, 2009 at 10:00:00 AM PDT

Share this with friends and family, if folks still have questions about the public option.

Two weeks ago we posted a piece here at Cure This -- How to Explain the Public Option for Healthcare reform. Really -- featuring Chris Hayes, DC editor at The Nation magazine, discussing the public option.  That post was the top search result on Google for "public option explanation" for quite a few days.  Clearly, Americans are looking for ways to better comprehend the proposed public option and other pieces of the larger healthcare reform discussion.  The number of hits on that search declined in the two to three days after President Obama's speech on healthcare reform last week.  Perhaps his description of the public option, among other pieces of his proposal, answered many Americans' questions.

On President Obama's historic address and healthcare reform

by: los anjalis

Mon Sep 14, 2009 at 08:00:00 AM PDT

A television station crew was present at Senator Feldman's house, to capture our thoughts after the speech.  There was a resounding sense of support for Obama's speech and for his healthcare proposals (including unanimous support for the public option piece).

Now, the speech was nothing less than historic on several levels...  

rest in peace, and in power, senator edward kennedy

by: los anjalis

Sat Aug 29, 2009 at 13:15:45 PM PDT

The world is a better place because of Senator Ted Kennedy. He surely had his share of accomplishments and his errors.  As President Obama said today, through his suffering, he came more alive to the plight of others.

Senator Ted Kennedy was an unapologetic liberal who never compromised on his principles.

After he passed, earlier this week, I came upon a few of his speeches. The one shared above is from May 2008, at a Montgomery County Democratic Committee reception. Kennedy earnestly shares how his family's struggles influenced his beliefs around health care for all Americans. What's more, the website TedKennedy.org has a number of his landmark speeches, including Kennedy's speech on national health insurance, at the 1978 Democratic National Convention in Memphis, Tennessee. It's powerful, and at the same time surprising that this speech -- so relevant today -- was given over thirty years ago. Here's an excerpt:

Our workshop here on health care will clarify this crucial point about priorities in spending federal dollars. One of the most shameful things about modern America is that in our unbelievably rich land, the quality of health care available to many of our people is unbelievably poor, and the cost is unbelievably high.

That is why national health insurance is the great unfinished business on the agenda of the Democratic Party. Our party gave Social Security to the nation in the 1930's. We gave Medicare to the nation in the 1960's. And we can bring national health insurance to the nation in the 1970's.

One of the saddest ironies in the worldwide movement for social justice in the twentieth century is that America now stands virtually alone in the international community on national health insurance. It seems that every nation is out of step but Uncle Sam. With the sole exception of South Africa, no other industrial naticn in the world leaves its citizens in fear ot financial ruin because of illness...

Together, we can lift that financial burden from all the families of America. Through national health insurance, we can provide a decent health care system for the benefit of the people of this land. We can make health care a basic right for all, not just an expensive privilege for the few.

But to achieve the reform, we need, we must have genuine leadership by the Democratic Party. We are heirs of a great tradition in American public life. Our party took up the cause of jobs for the unemployed in the Great Depression. Our party took up the cause of civil rights for black and brown Americans, and the cause of equal rights for women in America and the people of the District of Columbia.

In that same tradition of leadership, it is time for the Democratic Party now to take up the cause of health.

Post-Bourgie shares an excerpt from Michael Kelley's must-read 1990 piece about Ted Kennedy in GQ, sharing some of his numerous legislative accomplishments and his liberalism:

How to explain the public option for healthcare reform. Really.

by: los anjalis

Fri Aug 21, 2009 at 09:00:00 AM PDT

The speaker is Chris Hayes, DC editor of The Nation magazine, and the setting is the Netroots Nation blogger/media conference in Pittsburgh, August 2009.

After the conference, a blogger named Nicholas Beaudrot transformed Hayes' flowchart-gesturing and converted it into an easy to read and share flowchart about the public option. Click on the image to enlarge it.

FINALLY, easy to understand, right?  Precisely why you should share it with your colleagues, friends, and foes alike.  

The healthcare debate: don't let anyone tell you it's beyond your grasp

by: los anjalis

Tue Aug 18, 2009 at 16:48:12 PM PDT

Health-care reform is not that hard to understand, and those who tell you otherwise most likely have an ulterior motive.  Reform proponents exaggerate the complexity of the issue to elevate their own status as people who understand it; opponents exaggerate it to make the whole endeavor out to be a bureaucratic monstrosity.

- from "Your Handy Healthcare Cheat Sheet" by Alec MacGillis, WashingtonPost.com

Here's an example.  Last week, as I waited to board a flight, I was drawn to a mainstream "politics" show at the airline gate. This was a show on CNN, which featured an old white conservative man talking with old white male guests on his show. The topic: health care reform. In 20 minutes of discussion, the only information I could glean from the show was that we are screwed. Numbers and $$ costs and statistics were thrown at the audience in rapidfire fashion, in a very obvious attempt to derail the actual debate and incite fear in the public around the steep costs of reform. Nothing of great substance was discussed, and I came away not more knowledgeable, but more anxious.

So, coming back to this wonderful article. Please check it out.  Pass it on to your friends and family. Make sure you all know the framework and facts on both sides of the debate.  Thanks greatly to the author for clearly and concisely presenting the information. The article ends with this call to action:

It's your health care. Don't let anyone tell you that it's somehow beyond your grasp.

Right on.

everyone's talking about it. everyone.

by: los anjalis

Mon Aug 17, 2009 at 22:38:59 PM PDT

Tis very true, there's much debate over how much the various proposals for health insurance actually help the health of people in this country.  But it's also true that there are some very true access issues and life and death realities that need to be addressed.

So, shall we discuss? I'll try to post thoughts, creative framing, and interesting ideas and actions around moving forward in the health insurance reform debate. A strength of the CureThis community is that folks share personal narratives and stories, and perhaps this website can function as a space for such discussion.  As always, healthy debate is a good thing, and feel free to write posts or add your thoughts in the comments section of posts.

The Fight Will Be Dirty

by: cameronpage

Tue Apr 14, 2009 at 12:13:32 PM PDT

"I did not write a letter to the editor. It's not from me," said Gloria Gosselin, 75, of Lawrence.

Gosselin's name was on one of three strikingly similar letters touting the Medicare Advantage program that were sent to The Eagle-Tribune.

...

The letters were, in fact, composed and sent by the Boston office of [Dewey Square], a national political consulting firm, attempting to create the appearance of a "grass-roots" movement for Medicare Advantage.

America's Health Insurance Plans, an industry trade group, hired Dewey Square to defend the Medicare Advantage program.

It gets worse:

The Eagle-Tribune received a call from a man who turned out to be an intern at the Boston office of the Dewey Square Group, a national political marketing and consulting firm.

The man, who identified himself as Noah, wanted to know if Gloria Gosselin's letter had been published. Asked what interest he had in the letter, Noah replied that he was Gosselin's grandson.

Gosselin does not have a grandson named Noah working in Boston. Her only grandson is a student at Central Catholic.

Got it?  The fight will be dirty.  AHIP knows that to block healthcare reform, they will have to get rough.  And they're not going to sit back and let the groundswell of support for healthcare reform wash over them.

Conservative estimates are that AHIP has $100 million set aside to fight against healthcare reform.  And they seem to have every intention of playing dirty with it.  

So this is it.  We've been warned.  Consider this a shot across our bow.  It's going to be a serious, heavy-duty fight.  

And if we fail to reform the system because we don't fight back hard enough.... well, i was going to say we have no one to blame but ourselves.  But we can always blame the big bad insurance industry.  We can fail, and then we can comfort ourselves that they had more money, and they played dirty.

But I'd rather not comfort myself.  I'd rather win.  And we can.  We have the truth on our side, and better arguments, and oh yeah, history is on our side too, both in the U.S. and around the world.  Those are far more powerful than a willingness to play dirty.

Smears can always be defeated by the truth. But someone has to speak that truth.  Unfortunately, it never speaks for itself.  

Why It's Time: reach out and touch someone

by: cameronpage

Fri Feb 06, 2009 at 05:53:38 AM PST

How did I come up with this brilliant plan, you ask? Let me talk you through it...

Last night I admitted a 23 year-old woman to the hospital. Let's call her Marisa. Her only medical problem, diagnosed when she was fourteen, was Crohn's disease, which is an inflammatory condition of the bowel that causes unpleasantness like chronic diarrhea, vomiting and abdominal pain.

For many years Marisa's disease was well-controlled with Azathioprine, meaning she had very few of the disagreeable symptoms i just listed. Then a year ago her insurance (which was chosen by the university she attended --- none of that mythical free-market "choice") decided that they weren't going to cover azathioprine, because for most patients cheaper medicines would do the trick just as well.

There's a problem with basing overall policy on how most patients react. I've never met someone named Most Patients. Every real human being is a little bit different than the composite they create from research. It may be true that in a study of 4000 people, the average Diarrhea Symptom Index score (i just made that up) was not significantly different between Azathioprine and another medicine. But what does that matter to Marisa? For her the "average" patient is meaningless. She needs exactly this medicine to treat her disease.

We have a gargantuan, multi-billion dollar profit-making pharmaceutical industry in this country. The industry is constantly pumping out new drugs, each of which does almost exactly the same thing as its predecessor. Most of the time, it doesn't matter which of the ten available drugs is chosen. But in the rare cases where it does matter --- like now, with Marisa lying on a stretcher in front of me --- shouldn't the patient have access to the drug? Why do we have this massive pharmaceutical industry otherwise?

Marisa couldn't get her Azathioprine six months ago, so she was forced to try inferior alternatives, none of which have done the trick. She came to the ER last night because things had gotten so bad she'd begun to experience rectal bleeding. Not just blood in her stool, mind you: this is blood dripping from her rectum at random intervals without her control. She's twenty-three and she has to wear a diaper.

I could almost justify a system of huge profits, shameless marketing, and ridiculous unnecessary drugs, if at least that system gave this one 23 year-old the relief she was crying out to me for.

But it didn't. I had nothing to offer her.

The dinosaurs who believe in free-market healthcare carry around a certain fantasy --- something akin to elementary school civics class. Remember "How a Bill Becomes a Law"? We learned that there are three branches of government, and each branch provides checks and balances to the other two. None of them can get too strong, because the others are watching.

The free-marketeers think the same thing will happen in healthcare. They are deluded into thinking that although the pharmaceutical industry will ply us with expensive new medicines, the HMOs will keep them in line. In turn, consumers will keep the HMOs in line by demanding that they cover the medicines that work. Checks and balances.

But in the case of Marisa, we have an example of how the checks and balances only serve to slam every door and leave the patient out in the cold. The patient has no voice. It's not a coincidence that they call them for-profit entities, not for-patient entities.

You might think I'm naive to expect a giant HMO or pharmaceutical company not to pursue profit. And it's true, I would not expect otherwise. But that's why situations like Marisa's make me want to cry: corporations may be evil, but the human beings inside them aren't. If any of the people working for Aetna or Merck met this poor girl, and heard her story, I know they would do everything they could to get her the medications she needs. They would be touched, they would see her as a human being, and they would act compassionately.

But the people who work for Aetna and Merck haven't met Marisa. They don't know her story. They are are blissfully removed from her life, and from the lives of millions of other people they affect daily. For them, this 23 year-old Crohn's patient exists only as an account payable, a number to be spindled and manipulated and shifted into the proper column. If enough of these faceless numbers move in the right direction, the workers get a healthy year-end bonus. Hey, they're just doing their job. Nothing cruel or heartless about that.

Which is why it's time for the mandatory ER tours. Sign-up sheets will be posted soon.

Why It's Time

by: cameronpage

Mon Dec 29, 2008 at 06:19:20 AM PST

My cousin recently started a new job, and with it came a new health insurance plan. She has a minor neurological condition, but she thought that, since she moved directly from one job to the next, she would not be excluded from her new health plan. This, after all, is what the fabled COBRA coverage was designed to provide.

But it seems that some of the HMOs have evolved certain mutations that make them resistant to COBRA. When she tried to go see her neurologist, she was informed that she wasn't allowed because her insurance was severely restricted. Why, she asked? The reason was that four years earlier, she'd had a three-month gap in coverage while between jobs. Due to her lack of "continuous coverage", she only was given limited access to services.

What does this mean for my cousin? It means that for the next 18 months she is only allowed to see her primary care doctor. She gets one annual visit, and after that she has to pay out of pocket. No neurologist, no ob/gyn, no other specialists. They will cover life-threatening emergency room visits, but not common-sense preventive care for her neurologic condition.

Let's say her condition acutely worsens and she is forced to see specialists. She could be bankrupted by the repeated visits to the doctor that she will have to pay for. But if her condition had worsened a year earlier, it would have been covered by the insurance. Does this make any kind of sense?

Another point: is it really ethical to restrict a young woman from seeing an Ob/Gyn for 18 months? Yearly Pap smears are pretty much accepted as standard of care. Even the doctors employed by Aetna wouldn't try to argue that point. So how can they have a policy that prevents an "insured" 32 year-old from seeing an Ob/Gyn?  (Perhaps this is an added argument (if a perverse one) for why all internal medicine docs should be well-trained in pap smears).

The insurance company's argument in response would be something like this: "During that three-month gap in her coverage, she may have developed some condition which we cannot bear the financial responsibility for." Yes, who knows what crazy hijinks she got up to while she was Off The Grid? Everything will change after 18 months, of course. They'll have her all fixed up and spit-shined, and then she will be offered the full spectrum of first-tier HMO services.

The system is illogical and, as always, no single person is responsible. It's the impersonal nature of the cruelty that makes reform so urgent.

*not her real relationship to me