Category Archives: Health care

Trans-Pacific Partnership Reveals Deadly Cost of American Patents

How debates over the TPP overseas show how extortionate the US pharmaceuticals regime really is.

NC Reader Smacks Down Consumer Reports on Medicaid Clawback Advice

It’s fun to see someone who got themselves in a hole keep digging deeper.

20% of Obamacare Enrollees Failed to Make First Payment

Robert Pear of the New York Times has an important story today on the actual, as opposed to heavily-spun, state of play with Obamacare take-up.

Money and Elections in Washington: Pro Wrestling, but With More Respectable Clothes

kayfabe: Term in pro wrestling. Kayfabe was the unsaid rule that the wrestlers should stay in character during the show and in public appearances in order to maintain a feeling of reality (albeit suspended) among the fans.

How Obamacare Raids the Assets of Low-Income Older Americans

One feature of Obamacare that Lambert has mentioned in passing in his posts is that individuals over 55 who are enrolled in Medicaid are subject to having expenses like being in a long-term care facility, home services, and related drugs and prescriptions clawed back from their estates. A must read post at Paul Craig Roberts details how pernicious and sneaky these provisions are.

Gaius Publius: Obama Got $20 Million from Healthcare Industry in 2008. Was Killing Single Payer Part of the Deal?

If it walks like a duck, um, a pre-emptive bribe….

Republican State Lawmakers’ Refusal to Expand Medicaid Will Result in Thousands of Deaths

While this site has been critical of the (Un)Affordable Care Act as a further subsidy to an already bloated medical-industrial complex, we do need to give the devil his due. One of the sections of the law that appears to have been genuinely beneficial is Medicaid expansion. However, as most readers well know, the results are inequitable, with poor people in Republican states that refused to take up this provision being left out in the cold.

Michael Olenick: “Conversation with the Receptionists” – An Obamacare Skit

(Phone rings)

Receptionist: Beegbaux Medical Clinic, can I help you?

Obamacare Enrollments Show Low Uptake by Uninsured, Hoisting Insurers on Their Own Petard

One of the few saving graces is that the health insurers’ scheme to enrich themselves known as Obamacare may be going pear-shaped from the standpoint of their profits.

Why is the CDC Trying to Block an Accurate Lyme Disease Test?

Yves here. While this article may seem a bit far afield for this website, it illustrates how political considerations influence science and medicine, two fields we have been indoctrinated to view as relatively free of corporate and ideological influences.

Bob Goodwin: Mainstream Medicine Capture of Wikipedia

Yves here. Wikipedia has become widely accepted as a highly credible source (I use it and even contributed in their recent funding appeal). It’s therefore important to know its limits and how they arise. Unfortunately, it appears, like most information sources, that it is subject to pressure, in this case, as Bob Goodwin contends, the medical-industrial complex.

Simon Johnson Reminds Us That the Banks’ Quiet Coup is Still Very Much in Place

Simon Johnson wrote a remarkably blunt article for the Atlantic in May 2009 titled The Quiet Coup. In case you managed to miss it, it remains critically important reading. He provided an update of sorts in a New York Times column today.

America’s Shopper-in-Chief Has His Staff Sign Him Up for ObamaCare (But Not His Family)

By Lambert Strether of Corrente

And in a genius PR move, the White House describes Obama’s act of successful shopping avoidance as “symbolic.” As indeed it is, although not in the way the White House thinks, or could be said to think. WaPo has the details:

Obamacare Implementation as Teachable Moment

By Dan Fejes, who lives in northeast Ohio. Cross posted from Pruning Shears

Here is an interesting thing about the new health care law: News stories on it sometimes conflate flaws in the existing system with those in the new one. Many complaints about Obamacare are actually complaints about America’s health care system.

The administration bears some blame for that; the White House has done some conflating of its own. Most famously, the president assured us we would be able to keep our plans. That was never a promise he was in a position to keep. The new program still goes through the private insurance market, which means they decide what customers are restricted to.

Obama Exempts “If You Like It You Can Keep It” Cancelees from the Individual Mandate

By Lambert Strether of Corrente

And we go to Happyville, instead of to Pain City. –Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

In a six-part series on “ObamaCare’s relentless creation of second-class citizens,” I showed how people seeking health care through ObamaCare’s exchanges get randomly varying access to care because of age, geography (state and county), income, employment status, banking status, internet access, existing insurance status, language, demographics, and by CMS marketing category (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. In addition, people “on the bubble” for income eligibility are incentivized to corrupt the system by gaming it.)