Robert Maguire's Library tagged healthcare →  View Popular

Released yesterday:

(1) Smaller government, smaller national debt, lower deficits and lower taxes by opposing bills like Obama’s “stimulus” bill
(2) Market-based health care reform and oppose Obama-style government run healthcare;
(3) Market-based energy reforms by opposing cap and trade legislation;
(4) Workers’ right to secret ballot by opposing card check
(5) Legal immigration and assimilation into American society by opposing amnesty for illegal immigrants;
(6) Victory in Iraq and Afghanistan by supporting military-recommended troop surges;
(7) Containment of Iran and North Korea, particularly effective action to eliminate their nuclear weapons threat
(8) Retention of the Defense of Marriage Act;
(9)
Protecting the lives of vulnerable persons by opposing health care
rationing and denial of health care and government funding of abortion;
and
(10) The right to keep and bear arms by opposing government restrictions on gun ownership

Church leaders want health insurers to reimburse "spiritual health" practitioners who pray for the sick, reports the Washington Post. 

A proposal to that effect was stripped out of the House health bill, but the Church is lobbying to have it re-inserted into the Senate version.  

Critics storm that health care reform is “a cruel hoax and a delusion.” Ads in 100 newspapers thunder that reform would mean “the beginning of socialized medicine.”

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page predicts that the legislation will lead to “deteriorating service.” Business groups warn that Washington bureaucrats will invade “the privacy of the examination room,” that we are on the road to rationed care and that patients will lose the “freedom to choose their own doctor.”

All dire — but also wrong. Those forecasts date not from this year, but from the battle over Medicare in the early 1960s. I pulled them from newspaper archives and other accounts.

It’s now broadly apparent that those who opposed Social Security in 1935 and Medicare in 1965 were wrong in their fears and tried to obstruct a historical tide. This year, the fate of health care will come down to a handful of members of Congress, including Senators Joe Lieberman, Blanche Lincoln, Ben Nelson and Mary Landrieu. If they flinch and health reform fails, they’ll be letting down their country at a crucial juncture. They’ll be on the wrong side of history.

When an ambulance brought Daniel Webb home from the hospital after he hurt his knee in March, paramedics warned the then-550-pound man he probably wouldn't be able to get up from his recliner if they put him there, his wife said.

Webb told them to leave him there anyway. He would sit in that recliner, slowly dying, for the next eight months. Finally, paramedics were called back to his Greenwood home on Wednesday because he was in a lot of pain.

The recession made deficit cutting in the here and now imprudent in his first year; but now addressing the long-term debt is itself necessary for stabilizing the economy - and reassuring independent voters that he, unlike his predecessor, gives a damn about fiscal health. Well: the good news is that he's going to do exactly that:

President Barack Obama plans to announce in next year's State of the Union address that he wants to focus extensively on cutting the federal deficit in 2010 – and will downplay other new domestic spending beyond jobs programs, according to top aides involved in the planning.

the Congressional Budget Office has consistently underestimated costs savings from a variety of institutional changes to Medicare.  For instance:




Medicare enacts the prospective payments system (PPS) for reimbursing inpatient hospital stays.



• The CBO projected total Medicare spending will rise to $60 billion in 1986.
• Actual Medicare spending in 1986 was only $48 billion.
• The CBO projected a 9.1% reduction in Medicare spending.
• The actual savings turned out to be 50 percent greater in 1998 and 113 percent greater in 1999 than the budget office forecast.
• The CBO projected that spending on the drug benefit would be $206 billion.
• Actual spending was nearly 40 percent less than that.