Healthcare
I’ve read the editorial several times, and it still isn’t clear to me how or why the Projo writers avoided mentioning the problem of liability insurance for primary-care doctors. Shortly after I moved to Tiverton and found a nice local doctor to visit, he packed up and left the state for sunnier climes. My understanding…
Fred Thompson pointed out this afternoon that even the Chicago Tribune has doubts about President Obama’s proposed expansion of the federal government as a health care insurer. But we do know a few things about government-run health plans. We draw upon decades of experience with Medicare, the government’s plan for the elderly, and Medicaid, which…
These people aren’t fit to lead: [A citizen] opposed the [health insurance] rate hikes, as did other speakers including Lt. Gov. Elizabeth Roberts and state Rep. Edwin Pacheco, D-Burillville. Roberts, who has been working with business leaders, opposed any hikes until the state can develop a plan for affordable health care. Pacheco and Assistant Attorney…
A healthcare reform suggested by Sen. Kent Conrad (D, ND) sounds reasonable, but I’m not sure why it should be so limited: The Conrad proposal is modeled after rural electricity, farming and telephone cooperatives that are owned and organized by members. The entities would negotiate rates with health-care providers and would have to meet the…
Safeway CEO Stephen Burd explains: While comprehensive health-care reform needs to address a number of other key issues, we believe that personal responsibility and financial incentives are the path to a healthier America. By our calculation, if the nation had adopted our approach in 2005, the nation’s direct health-care bill would be $550 billion less…
Who knew finding twelve digits of savings in the healthcare industry would be this easy? The administration expects to achieve the lowered hospital payments in two major ways. First, said Obama’s budget director, Peter Orszag, payments to hospitals will be reduced to try to encourage them to work more productively and efficiently. Orszag said hospitals…
James Poulus observes: I’ve said elsewhere that our vision of politics is being corrupted by a well-meaning but misguided epistemology of compassion: increasingly, we consider the person or group demanding a right to be the most trustworthy source of information about whether they deserve it. Anyone aggrieved, we think, must really be suffering grief, and…
That’s being a Congressman, for ya. Patrick Kennedy hopes to get back to work from a mental health retreat “in time for the… debate on a national health-care overhaul later in the summer.” Presumably, he needn’t expend any hope on whether the checks from his $174,000 salary will keep arriving, whether or not he manages…
Blogger Keith Hennessey, a former White House Senior Economic advisor, has been providing details of the various Federal healthcare reform proposals under consideration, as they become available. His summary of what he’s seen so far is…The government would mandate not only that you must buy health insurance, but what health insurance counts as “qualifying.” Health…
It isn’t difficult to predict the effects of this. On one side: A first-ever tax on employer-provided health benefits also figures prominently among options under consideration in Congress, but Obama campaigned against that last year and its inclusion in the bill would require him to reverse course. … … Private companies would be barred from…
