France and U.S. Health Care: Twins Separated at Birth? - Megan McArdle - Business. Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry By way of introduction, I want to make clear that I have no particular expertise when it comes to healthcare policy. My knowledge is merely that of a layman who follows the news. I'm even well-aware that one of my esteemed co-guest bloggers is Avik Roy, who's one of the most talented health care wonks on the internet, whose work I avidly followed at his previous National Review digs. In fact, this post can be read as an invitation to Avik to enlighten me. All that being said, from my outlook there's something that I haven't seen discussed and yet seems striking to me: how similar the French and U.S. healthcare systems are.
On its face, this seems like a preposterous notion: whenever the two are mentioned together, it's to say that they're polar opposites. France has been called the best healthcare system in the world by the World Health Organization. And yet, to me, the similarities are glaring: When we had our baby, my wife and I sprung for a private clinic.
Affordable Health Care in Thailand and Costa Rica. This year, a few hundred thousand intrepid American travellers will head to places like Thailand and Costa Rica, in search of something that they can’t find in the United States. They won’t be looking for Mayan ruins or ancient Buddhist temples, but something a bit more practical: affordable medical care. These medical tourists will be getting root canals, knee surgeries, and hip replacements at foreign hospitals. If health-care costs in the U.S. keep rising—and especially if Obamacare is overturned by the Supreme Court—more of us may soon be joining them. For decades, wealthy people from developing countries have come here for care, but these days medical tourists travel all over the world.
For Americans, the attraction is obvious: medical care is a lot cheaper abroad. There are a host of forces that could change this. If more Americans sought care abroad, it wouldn’t just save them money; it could also help control medical costs at home. It's Not About Broccoli!: The False Case Against Health Care - Einer Elhauge - National. The law's challengers argue that mandating insurance is like forcing Americans to buy more vegetables. Here's what makes that logic so flawed -- and dangerous.
Dick Morris/Flickr The challengers of the health insurance mandate have focused on the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution. But there is a limiting principle; it is the one the Supreme Court has actually articulated in its cases. So the problem is not that there is no limiting principle. How does one address the terrible specter of a broccoli mandate? First, just because we may all agree that a certain type of law would seem stupid, does not mean the courts can insert a ban on such laws into the Constitution. Second, if we all agree that a broccoli mandate seems stupid, then our political process will never impose it. Third, the challengers' argument would imply that the Commerce Clause must not give Congress any power to ban purchases of any product.
Get Sick. Can't Pay? Go to Jail! Indeed, you can go to jail even if you don't owe any money if the collection company for your medical provider thinks you do: A breast cancer survivor who was sent to prison over a mistaken $280 medical bill has highlighted the return of debtor's prisons in the U.S. Illinois resident Lisa Lindsay had received the medical bill in error and was told she did not have to pay up.However, the bill was turned over to a collection agency and state troopers arrived at her home and took her away in handcuffs.
So, cancer survivor Lisa Lindsay eventually paid the bill she didn't owe + $600 for legal and court fees just to be sure this never happened to her again, or at least for this non-existent debt. Better safe than sorry, right? At this point you might be saying to yourself, WTF? I thought the US eliminated debtors' prisons in the early 19th century. How is this done? Of course not every state allows such practices, but many do. And people wonder why privatization of prisons is increasing. National - Kevin Caves & Einer Elhauge - What a Nobel Prize-Winning Economist Can Teach Us About Obamacare. Ronald Coase's example of farmers and ranchers shows that the insurance mandate is about responsibility, not liberty. mrfoto/Shutterstock Ronald Coase won the Nobel Prize in Economics for showing that social costs are symmetrical. In The Problem of Social Cost, Coase invoked the example of a farmer whose crops are trampled by the neighboring rancher's cattle.
Before Coase, it would have been common to view the rancher as the culprit responsible for imposing costs on the blameless farmer. Coase pointed out that no matter which way the legal rights were allocated, one was imposing costs on the other. Coase's work was instrumental in establishing a new field of scholarship -- the economic analysis of the law, which has been highly influential in many legal areas. But as Coase's analysis makes clear, framing the issue in terms of individual liberty is deeply misleading. In other words, the issue is not whether to have a mandate, but rather on whom the mandate should be imposed. Trying to Catch His Breath With a Hole-Ridden Safety Net | EvoEcoLab. I’m sitting here on a bed that constantly readjusts itself. It’s terribly annoying and when I lay down on it there is a low rumbling of the motor that pushes air to my legs and sucks it from butt.
The noise makes that grey matter between the ears in my head shake. Probably a malfunctioning bed, but it’s nothing to complain about given what is sitting next to me, 2 meters over, in the next adjustable bed. I’m at Carteret General Hospital on North Carolina’s scenic Crystal Coast, where I live. My beautiful, precious 6 year old son was admitted this past Tuesday for Pneumonia. It started 6 days before on a Wednesday. He asked his kindergarten teacher if he could lay down. On Thursday we kept him home as he was obviously feverish and had flu like symptoms. We should have taken him to the Urgent Care right then and there. That was until my eldest started kindergarten this Fall. But recently my mindset has become affected by our position. Naturally, I was dumbfounded. "Don’t Follow America on Health Care" by Prabhat Jha. Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space TORONTO – With the United States Supreme Court set to begin considering the Affordable Care Act (the historic health-care reform derided by opponents as “Obamacare”), it is worth noting that the number of Americans without health insurance reached an all-time high in 2010, the year the law was enacted.
Roughly 50 million US residents (one in six) pay out-of-pocket for medical expenses. The 2008 recession is not the only reason for this staggering figure; long-term political and policy choices are also to blame. The US is one of the few high-income countries that does not finance health care through a publicly funded prepaid system. Most rich countries choose to finance their health care publicly for several reasons.
At the same time, public spending acts as a brake on overall spending, and prevents the rapid cost escalation to which America’s private insurance companies contribute. Pre-existing conditions: The real reason insurers won’t cover people who are already sick. Jupiterimages/Thinkstock. There are currently tens of millions of Americans without health insurance. Some can’t afford coverage at going rates. But as recently as 2009, one in seven applicants were rejected by the four largest insurance companies, who refused to sell them insurance at any price. Uninsurable Americans are mostly sick to begin with: They have heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and other pre-existing conditions that set off alarm bells for insurance sellers.
Ask why the already-sick can’t buy insurance and you get an immediate and seemingly obvious answer—their health costs are too high. But just because covering people with pre-existing conditions might be more expensive doesn’t explain why they can’t buy insurance at all. An intriguing answer to that question comes from Nathaniel Hendren, a graduating Ph.D. student at MIT, in a study that got him offers from economics departments at Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton, among others. Our great healthcare denial. If you follow national debates about health care, surely you remember the story: It was the fall of 2007, and then-President Bush had recently vetoed an expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP). In response, the Democrats tapped 12-year-old Graeme Frost to deliver the response to Bush’s weekly radio address. Frost had sustained significant brain injuries in a 2004 car crash and was a beneficiary of S-CHIP — as was his sister Gemma, whose brain injuries were still more severe.
After their horrific collision, both children had fallen into comas — Graeme for days, Gemma for weeks. Gemma had an open-skull fracture, shattering her left eye orbit, and when she emerged from her coma, doctors planned reconstructive eye surgery on her eye — but cancelled it, according to the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore (where the Frost children did their rehabilitation therapy), “when they discovered an abscess filled with shards of wood and glass.”
Supreme Court and Obamacare: why the conservatives are skeptical of the Affordable Care Act. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images. Read all of Slate’s coverage about the Affordable Care Act. The fight over Obamacare is about freedom. That’s what we’ve been told since these lawsuits were filed two years ago, and that’s what we heard both inside and outside the Supreme Court this morning. That’s what Michele Bachmann* and Rick Santorum have been saying for months. Even people who support President Obama’s signature legislative achievement would agree that this debate is all about freedom—the freedom to never be one medical emergency away from economic ruin. What we have been waiting to hear is how members of the Supreme Court—especially the conservative majority—define that freedom. This morning, as the justices pondered whether the individual mandate—that part of the Affordable Care Act that requires most Americans to purchase health insurance or pay a penalty—is constitutional, we got a window into the freedom some of the justices long for.
Follow Freedom is the freedom not to rescue. Affordable Care Act, the Supreme Court, and the Constitution: Harvard law professor Einer Elhauge shows how the Founding Fathers supported mandates. National Archives/Getty Images The five conservative justices on the Supreme Court—Thomas, Alito, Scalia, Roberts and Kennedy—cloak themselves in the myth that they are somehow channeling the wisdom and understanding of the Founding Fathers, the original intent that guided the drafting of the Constitution. I believe the premise of their argument is itself suspect: It is not clear to me how much weight should be given to non-textually based intent that is practically impossible to discern more than 200 years later.
Most of the issues over which there is constitutional dispute today could not even have been envisioned when the document was drafted. Even so, it would be an even better response to the conservative wing’s claim of perceived understanding of original intent to be able to refute their claims by showing them to be historically and indisputably wrong. So once again let’s venture into the world of the health care debate. The 'Obamacare' challenge to American individualism. Early in the morning, half awake, I heard my husband let out a whooping cheer from somewhere in the house. “I can’t believe it,” he kept saying. Like most of my friends, he--a Director of Public Health--- was sure the Supreme Court would never uphold the patient Affordable Care Act (ACA), President’s Barack Obama’s signature effort of his years in office.
Designed to increase the number of people covered by health insurance, by restructuring the fragmented, expensive and ineffective American health care system, Congress passed this historic—though very imperfect---bill in 2010. Republicans, nearly apoplectic, argued that the ACA violated the Constitution because it required each individual to buy medical insurance. Nail-biting days had finally ended. No, it’s not what I wanted. But the obstacles had been formidable. Unfortunately, Obama also failed miserably at framing the issue or at setting the terms of debate after Congress passed the legislation.
Obamacare is not perfect. We’re getting wildly differing assessments. The announcement of the Supreme Court’s decision largely upholding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act on Thursday, June 28 precipitated a genuine media drama. Millions tuned in to get the result in real time, and were rewarded with the spectacle of two major news networks reporting the story incorrectly. Indeed, the President himself was in limbo while his staff raced to find out whether the Court had struck down his signature policy initiative. I have taken a deep dive into those events; my first effort at real journalism. The following is the story of what happened at the Supreme Court, SCOTUSblog, CNN, Fox News, and the White House that day between 10:06 (when the Court released the opinion) and 10:15 (when CNN reversed itself and reported that the mandate had been upheld).
Everything is based on interviews with those directly involved; nothing is second hand. Two quick notes. 10:00 am last Thursday – Places please 10:06:40 – Here we go But it does. 10:07:50 – First reports. America: Where It's Easier to Get a Gun Than Good Mental Health Care. Photo Credit: Tony Webster June 10, 2012 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. Last spring my younger sister Kathy jumped off a freeway bridge in Phoenix.
For better or worse, she lived. Since that first handful of analgesics, Kathy has made an effort to die somewhere between 12 and 15 times: prescription pills, threatened jumps from an apartment balcony and a communications tower, an attempt at drowning, a car set on fire. For three days, Seattle has been reeling, grieving a wave of senseless violence that left five dead, including a shooter who was, from his family’s description, bipolar like my sister. When someone kills – we ask why?
As a psychologist, I used to have an outpatient mental health practice in Seattle. The state of Arizona spent close to a million dollars last year putting Kathy back together after she fell 49 feet. Obamacare, Citizens United, and the Supreme Court’s Independence. Originally, the Supreme Court of the United States met in a drafty room on the second floor of an old stone building called the Merchants’ Exchange, at the corner of Broad and Water Streets, in New York. The ground floor, an arcade, was a stock exchange.
Lectures and concerts were held upstairs. For meeting, there weren’t many places to choose from. Much of the city had burned to the ground during the Revolutionary War; nevertheless, New York became the nation’s capital in 1785. After George Washington was inaugurated in 1789, he appointed six Supreme Court Justices—the Constitution doesn’t say how many there ought to be—but on February 1, 1790, the first day the Court was called to session, upstairs in the Exchange, only three Justices showed up and so, lacking a quorum, court was adjourned. Months later, when the nation’s capital moved to Philadelphia, the Supreme Court met in City Hall, where it shared quarters with the mayor’s court.
In 1995, in U.S. v. There is more at stake, too. Politics - Tom Perriello - The Real Affordable Care Act Battle: Constitutionalists vs. Confederates. Dark money middlemen. The Supreme Court Upholds Obamacare - National. Why Justice Roberts' Opinion Could Set Alarming Precedents | News & Politics. Many hospitals, doctors offer cash discount for medical bills.