In what is becoming a typical pattern for the Obama administration, right wing opponents of some of his initiatives (like reappointing Bernanke) are finding common cause with progressives, an alliance that seemed unthinkable a mere year ago. While the left is generally behind the health care reform bill, support is far from universal. And a […]
Read more...Reader Crocodile Chuck pointed out a set of articles at the New York Times that illustrates how skewed priorities in America have become. They also reveal how little public ire there is in the face of large-scale abuses that affect the average Joe. If corporate prerogatives cannot be reined in when personal safety is at […]
Read more...DoctoRx was puzzled by a report in Bloomberg that the Mayo Clinic in Glendale, Arizona will “stop treating” certain Medicare patients. Many readers no doubt know that Mayo is touted not just as a model for high quality of delivery of health care services, but also affordability. Here is the gist of the story: More […]
Read more...It is obvious that many republicans oppose the proposed health care bill. But many liberals and progressives oppose it as well. For example, economist L. Randall Wray writes: Here’s the opportunity, Wall Street’s newest and bestest gamble: there is a huge untapped market of some 50 million people who are not paying insurance premiums—and the […]
Read more...I got pushback on a post I put up yesterday critical of the health care reform bill from readers who pointed to the fact that folks like Paul Krugman and Al Franken were supporting it meant it must be at least OK. Well, it isn’t, and don’t delude yourself into thinking that. Why did health […]
Read more...Ah, another Christmas Eve story that (not surprisingly) has gotten little attention. Most of the ire directed against the phony health care reform bill focuses on how it further enriches a fat and undeserving health insurance industry. The media has given less attention to another group that has thrown plenty of lobbying dollars at getting […]
Read more...One of my many pet peeves is drug marketing. Even though Big Phama likes to tout how much it spends on R&D as a justification for high drug prices, it spends more on marketing as a percentage of revenues than it does on R&D. Think about it: in what other industry are the margins high […]
Read more...As readers probably know, the health care reform bill passed the House tonight, by a thin margin and with the Democrats offering a large concession by limiting reimbursements on abortions. Thomas Frank has a good piece in the New York Times tonight, in which he argues that health care reform might lead more doctors to […]
Read more...It should come as no surprise that those at the top of the food chain get preferential treatment on all levels. But this still stinks to high heaven. Employees of the Goldman, the Fed, Citigroup, and other banks are getting H1N1 vaccine allotments out of proportion to what can be justified from a public health […]
Read more...A fascinating and somewhat disturbing article at the New York Review of Books by Jerome Groopman looks at what counts for progress in medical diagnosis and finds it to be more of a mixed bag than most readers would assume. This won’t come as much of a surprise to those who know a bit about […]
Read more...In the early days of this blog, I would often wind up comparing coverage of news between the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal because the offender (almost without exception the Journal) had done a job so poor or misleading that it merited comment. Then the credit crisis forced the Journal to up its […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, an investment strategist who writes for the New Deal 2.0. A history of failed attempts to introduce universal health insurance has left us with a system in which the government pays directly or indirectly for more than half of the nation’s health care, but the actual delivery both of insurance and of […]
Read more...In the waning days of Lehman, this blog described a particularly avid defender of the beleaguered bank at CNBC as “the favorite outlet of those who aspire to paint the tape.” That was not terribly well received, needless to say. The New York Times seems to be adopting a similar fawning posture towards health insurers. […]
Read more...From Marshall Auerback, an investment management and commentator who writes for New Deal 2.0. No more free passes. A number of the President’s supporters who expressed concerns about the pro-Wall Street tilt of his early administration decisions were prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt so long as he came through on healthcare. […]
Read more...One of the guest bloggers here, the esteemed Ed Harrison, was initially more hopeful about Obama than some of us (I an sufficiently cynical that I find it hard to get excited about any politician, although I will confess to falling for Australia’s Kevin Rudd) but is now calling him a black Herbert Hoover. Even […]
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