Health care reform: A crossroads?

Jul. 22nd, 2009 by Pia Christensen
Filed under: Government, Health care reform 

There’s an endless stream of stories about health care reform in advance of President Obama’s prime-time news conference tonight. We’ve highlighted a few:

Karen Tumulty of Time reviews where things stand and writes that legislators are saying, privately, that it would help if Obama would be clearer about how he wants to fix the health care system. She reports that the press conference is just one sign that the president is becoming more engaged on the subject.

This Jan. 29 photo was taken during a meeting about how to fund health reform. (White House photo by by Pete Souza)

This Jan. 29 photo was taken during a meeting about how to fund health reform. (White House photo by by Pete Souza)

Ezra Klein of The Washington Post points readers to a column by The New York Times‘ David Leonhardt: “He’s trying to puzzle through (a) what’s in health-care reform for the average insured American, and (b) how to explain to to them.” Leonhardt says “The immediate task facing Mr. Obama — in his news conference on Wednesday night and beyond — is to explain that the health care system doesn’t really work the way it seems to.”

Klein was among a group of reporters invited to discuss health care reform with Sen. Nancy Pelosi today. He posted a report of what she said. Interesting to note that Pelosi said “the [Congessional Budget Office] doesn’t count things that we know will save money, like prevention, wellness and end-of-life issues.” One of the country’s leading experts on the subject, Rutgers’ Louise Russell, disagrees that preventive care saves money.

The National Association of Health Centers points us to C-SPAN to follow the committee mark ups on health care reform bills. C-SPAN is streaming them live and archiving them. C-SPAN also has a page devoted to health care.

Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic breaks down the question of cost in the House bill into three separate questions.

AHCJ president Trudy Lieberman, writing for Columbia Journalism Review, continues her look at lessons from the health reform law passed in Massachusetts three years ago.”The last few weeks have not been great ones for the Massachusetts health reform law. As Congressional committees issue draft legislation calling for reform resembling Massachusetts’s Grand Experiment, the ghosts of cost controls—or, more aptly, the lack thereof—are beginning to haunt.” (The entire series is archived here).

CNN asks “Will Obama’s health care plan mirror the 1994 Clinton failure?” in a piece that lays out the challenges in his way and reveals poll results that show that 44 percent of people polled don’t approve of how he’s handling the issue.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Janet Adamy boils down the entire health care reform effort into ten bite-sized questions, ranging from “What is the problem with health care any way” all the way to “Which industries are most likely to lose, and which to gain, from any overhaul?” Adamy juggles economics, politics and history without sacrificing the simplicity of her well-reasoned wide-perspective look at a notoriously complex process.

Slate’s Timothy Noah has updated the online magazine’s cheat sheet to following health care reform online. Noah’s take on who and what you should be reading, sprinkled with a healthy dose of opinion, encompasses a mix of government sources, pundits, lobbyists, bloggers and academics. He even squeezes a few journalists in there; his “Journalism and Essays of Lasting Interest” section is a handy list of milestone pieces of the past few years.

The White House Briefing blog says advance excerpts of tonight’s address will be posted. At 8pm ET, the press conference will stream live at Whitehouse.gov/Live.

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Comments

2 Comments on Health care reform: A crossroads?

  1. Brad Wright on Wed, 22nd Jul 2009 11:24 pm

    2. Check out my health care blog at http://www.healthpolicyanalysis.com. I’ve just posted some textual analysis of Obama’s Weds. press conference using word clouds. Come check it out and tell me what you think. Don’t forget to tell your friends about my blog!

    You can access the post here: http://www.healthpolicyanalysis.com/2009/07/obama-press-conference-walk-in-word.html

  2. Mark S. Wagner, MD on Sun, 16th Aug 2009 2:24 pm

    3. I am a board certified emergency physician with 30 years of experience and have seen “America’s Emergency Safety Net” gradually erode. I have personally suffered episodic ill health due to work stress and am forced at the age of 56 to consider retiring from my specialty. Many of my colleagues are burned out and want to leave the specialty of Emergency Medicine. Government has mandated we see all comers but is reducing our compensation disproportionately.
    Please help improve access to “real” emergency care and not increasingly overwhelm us more by your bureaucratic mismanagement.
    While an Emergency Medicine Resident at Harbor-UCLA in Los Angeles County in 1982 I treated an overdose patient that was inappropriately transferred from a neighboring hospital. This case became one of the sentinel cases in California that resulted in anti-dumping statutes that later led to passage of Federal EMTALA in 1986. I worked on a California/American College of Emergency Medicine Committee with Michael Jay Bresler, MD, FACEP, who is given credit for establishing several legislative amendments during his tenure on the Cal/ACEP Board.
    I therefore speak with some experience in helping to draft legislation to improve patient care outcomes when suffering emergencies.

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