Popular Progressive has some information on the Wellstone Mental Healh Parity bill that passed in the bailout bill last week.
The Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction…
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Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.
Deregulation sure worked out great with the banking industry. Now McCain wants to do the same thing to health insurance.
Does that mean if McCain is elected president then the government will have to eventually bail out health insurance companies and we will finally have a government run health care system that actually works?
Last fall, SCHIP passed the Senate with a veto proof margin, but it was unable to get enough votes to override Bush’s veto in the House.
However, this spring 3 House seats in heavily Republican districts have been won by Democrats, which makes you wonder if SCHIP should be brought back up for a vote.
Now the closest vote on veto-override was 273-156 which put it 13 “yeas” short of override. Childers and Cazayoux explicitly and prominently support SCHIP expansion in their campaign web sites. Foster was more generally for UHC so I imagine he’s on board for SCHIP. So that narrows the margin to 276-153 at least. So we’d only need to flip another 10 votes to override.
With the GOP reeling I’m sure even some of the staunchest nay votes in the darkest red districts must be sweating a little. Doubting the surety of their re-election just a little. Back in 2007 they could assure themselves that Democrats would trip-up and the Republican situation would improve. It hasn’t and the trendline isn’t good.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) has a bill called the Healthy Americans Act that has bipartisan support in the Senate. The bill calls for health care you can keep, so you can tell your boss to take this job and shove it, but still keep your health care.
If you hate your job, but need your health care, you’re stuck. If you want to go back to school, start a business, find a new job, or just plain quit, you’re stuck.
It’s called job lock.
Whether you love your job or hate your job, you should be able to keep your health care no matter what you choose to do.
Public Television’s Frontline aired a program tonight called Sick Around the World that takes a look at how 5 different countries achieve universal health care. After looking at these 5 wealthy capitalized countries they find…
It’s not all socialized medicine in the capitalist democracies examined in this report, but they don’t trust health care entirely to the free market, either.
It is clear there is a lot of room for improvement in the United States’ health care system. The United States spends the most of any country on health care, but are far from covering everyone.
The program comes up with these 3 conclusions on how the United States can improve its health care system…
1. Insurance companies must accept everyone and can’t make a profit on basic care. 2. Everyone must buy into insurance and the government pays premiums for the poor. 3. Doctors and Hospitals must accept one standard set of fixed prices.
If I get the time later in the week, I will post more on the details in each country, but I encourage you to watch the program online here.
An 11-year-old girl died after her parents prayed for healing rather than seek medical help for a treatable form of diabetes, police said Tuesday. Everest Metro Police Chief Dan Vergin said Madeline Neumann died Sunday.
“She got sicker and sicker until she was dead,” he said.
Vergin said an autopsy determined the girl died from diabetic ketoacidosis, an ailment that left her with too little insulin in her body, and she had probably been ill for about 30 days, suffering symptoms like nausea, vomiting, excessive thirst, loss of appetite and weakness. The girl’s parents, Dale and Leilani Neumann, attributed the death to “apparently they didn’t have enough faith,” the police chief said.
Mark Thoma asks how you would change the New Deal to update it for the 21st century.
Suppose you had the power to alter the New Deal however you want. Some of you would abolish it all together, and shame on you, but for those who would choose to keep it around, how would you change it? What issues should an updated New Deal address? Perhaps:
We need to provide health and dental insurance that doesn’t end when a worker changes or is between jobs.
We should recognize that it is normal for both parents to work outside the home. Child care that is affordable, reliable, and that helps children to get off to the best possible start needs to be available to all parents. For many parents, this is a big problem.
We are much more geographically mobile than we were in the 1930s. If we expect a flexible workforce, we need to do more to support geographic movement of workers and their families.
I would redefine poverty as a relative rather than an absolute standard and ensure that everyone has what they need to fully participate in society. And if my powers do not extend that far, I would at least raise - substantially - the absolute poverty threshold and then make sure nobody falls below it. Right now, it’s too low. Along these lines, an expansion of the EITC is needed as well.
The existence of large speculative bubbles - first in the stock market then in the housing market - threatens to undermine the stability of the economy and put an end to “The Great Moderation.” We need to reexamine the regulatory structure of the financial sector to be sure we are doing all we can to prevent destabilizing bubbles from emerging. If the consequences were confined to participants in these markets this wouldn’t be necessary, but they are not. Problems in financial markets spread through the economy more generally and impose costs on people who had nothing to do with the creation of the problem.
The most important thing on that list, in my opinion, is providing health insurance that doesn’t end when a worker changes or is between jobs. We must have health insurance that is from birth to death. Right now insurance companies are providing coverage from job to job and have no incentive to encourage prevention and wellness. Who provides that coverage or how it is accomplished is up for discussion, as long as the coverage is from birth to death.
