health care

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Bloomberg’s “Kiss of Death”

Third-term disaster Michael Bloomberg is apparently so frustrated by every New Yorker’s determination to ignore him in the waning days of his administration that he took to the pages of New York magazine to weigh in on the current electoral race to be Not Bloomberg. Most of the digital ink being spread on this piece is on Bloomberg’s bizarre charge that current Democratic front-runner Bill deBlasio is being “racist” for, um, marrying a black woman and raising an adorable multi-racial family with her. Not to get all Inigo Montoya, but I do not think this term means what the lame-duck Mayor thinks it means. Which is odd, because I’m pretty sure if you look up the word “racism” in the Oxford English Dictionary, you will find a WSJ-style stipple portrait of hizzoner with a description of the NYPD’s “stop and frisk” program. But the real red meat of el Bloombito’s […]

NYAAF’s 10th Anniversary Celebration

Since it seems my main venue of non-labor activism is charitable giving, I have signed on as a Co-Chair of the New York Abortion Access Fund‘s 10th Anniversary Celebration. This is a wonderful organization that directly addresses what may be the greatest threat to reproductive freedom today: the high cost of, and limited access to, abortion procedures. This is an entirely-volunteer grassroots organization that puts money directly in the service of women in need. They do intake and connect women to the best health-provider for their situation, negotiate lower rates and leverage what matching funds they can raise from donors like you and help women get the medical help they need. This may be the first time that the NYAAF has held any kind of event like this; y’know, a seemingly bourgey cocktail party. I’m glad they are doing it. Firstly, nothing is too good for the working class. Secondly, […]

The Good, The Perfect and the Wisconsin Compromise

I attended an interesting conference on “Health Care for All,” sponsored by Citizen Action at Rutgers University today, with a lot of breathless anticipation about how the 2008 elections were going to provide a mandate to finally get a national health plan. That is, if our policy-thinkers and policy-makers don’t compromise it to death. Dr. Oliver Fein, of Physicians for a National Health Plan, provided a spirited advocacy for universal single payer health care – “Medicare for All” – with a direct challenge to the for-profit insurance lobby and the compromisers. Too bad he’s not running for President. Representatives for Obama’s and Clinton’s campaigns were in attendance and said a whole lot about nothing, which does not bode well for voters’ supposed mandate for meaningful reform. In the face of federal inaction, many states are putting together piecemeal, stop-gap programs. New Jersey’s slow move in this direction was the ostensible […]

Another Fake Ally for Health Care

Andy Stern continues to invite more strange fellows into his bed. The President of the Service Employees Union has drifted far astray from the rest of the labor movement and most sensible healthcare reformers by partnering with Wal-Mart, the Business Roundtable and other pro-business groups whose agenda is in direct opposition to ours. Their wet dream is to dump their insurance obligations on the public ledger, not to ensure that everyone can receive good medical treatment at “no cost” through public funds, funded in large part by a payroll tax on employers. “Medicare for all” must be our goal, and any proposal that leaves private insurance companies free to exploit and profit, or that places most of the burden for funding the program on the backs of taxpayers and workers who have already won health insurance from their employers through their unions is bound to fail. Stern recently welcomed into […]

The High Cost of Health Care (For Cats)

The high cost of health care is a problem for more than just us monkeys. The price of veterinary services has skyrocketed faster than inflation, too. I had the opportunity to buy pet insurance through my union, but declined. Pet insurance is for little old ladies who order chemo-therapy for their hobbled, mangy 19-year-old cats, isn’t? Well, about two months ago, my cat, the duck, began a campaign of biological warfare in protest of my longer hours at work on a campaign in New Jersey (or so I thought). I took her to the vet. Urine tests were inconclusive, but antibiotics were prescribed anyway, in case it was a urinary tract infection. Oh, and duck needed booster vaccinations. It’s the law, the vet said. The bill was eighty bucks, but that didn’t seem too bad a price to pay to get my cat to stop peeing on every piece of […]

More On Inequality Sickness

Following up on my previous post, in case I wasn’t clear (“Are you following me?”), here is a simple graph that argues much more clearly that inequality is making us sicker: This chart represents diabetes rates by income group (divided simply into thirds; the richest third of the population, the middle third and the poorest third) in the UK and the US. First, note that the poorer you are, the likelier you are to have diabetes. In America, this is not surprising, because our poor lack health care. In the UK, however, the poor has the same health care as the rich (or at least the middle class), and yet they are still more likely to have diabetes, although not nearly as likely as their American counterparts. But now, compare the poorest Brits to the richest Americans. Lower rates of diabetes! Both groups receive similar quality of health care, so […]

Dr. Robin Hood

Dean Robinson’s “Health Politics and Inequality” class has taken some surprising turns. Jill Quadagno’s book, “One Nation, Uninsured” served as an efficient history of how we got the lousy system of health care that we have, so the questions of how and what kinds of alternatives we ca have were neatly dispensed with. Basically, the “simplest” and fairest universal system would be to simply expand our already existing Medicare system to cover everyone. That would give us the Canadian “single payer” system (which, coincidentally, is also called Medicare). Of course, to fund the program, the government would have to institute a new payroll tax on employers. For employers who already pay around a quarter of an employee’s salary in insurance premiums, this would essentially replace those premiums and would probably lower their costs and improve their market position, as it would serve to “take health care out of competition” by […]

Health Care’s “Death Spiral”

In “Uninsured in America,” Susan Starr Sered and Rushika Fernandopulle attempt to find out “where the bodies are buried” in our health care system where over 45 million people have no insurance. The book is a patchwork of profiles of people who got sick at times when they lacked insurance and the often devastating effects this had on their lives. The authors, who describe this phenomenon as the “death spiral,” don’t find so many bodies buried (although they do find many in jails or on the street) but they do find health problems that are allowed to become critical before state assistance will kick in and doctors actually pay attention, and emergency rooms used as primary care resulting in crippling debts. Without getting bogged down in dry facts and figures, the authors provide a pretty good understanding of how the number of uninsured Americans hides how many Americans are functionally […]

Why No National Health Care?

The United States has the best health care that money can buy, provided one has the money to buy it. Jill Quadagno’s “One Nation Uninsured” answers the question “Why the U.S. has no national health insurance.” It’s a brisk, engaging read that neatly summarizes how 90 years of failed reform efforts have entrenched the powerful interests that profit from the system. The most prominent early opponents of a national health service were the doctors themselves. Their lobby, the American Medical Association, fought against “socialized medicine” out of fear that it would lead doctors to lose their sovereignty to bureaucrats basing decisions on budgetary needs rather than medical needs. Allied with southern politicians who feared that a federal health system would force racial integration of hospitals, these forces successfully kept national health care out of Roosevelt’s original Social Security legislation. They favored market solutions like Blue Cross and commercial insurance. A […]