Both Point 08 Acres and Adam Reilly watch last night’s gubernatorial debate and came away with similar conclusions: Chris Gabrielli needs to talk about more than stem cell research. I missed the debate but suspect they’re right. Gabrielli’s ads are slick and smart advertising, and I think his stem cell one might be effective as […]
The biggest problem our national health care system faces is the mismatched soldering of a private insurance delivery onto a public-right-to-health mentality. Conservatives want to return to a pure version of the former in order to bring efficiency and line up incentives properly. They want individuals to be able to pool risk, but ultimately be responsible for […]
Charley at Blue Mass points to Robert Kuttner’s reflections on the recent Massachusetts health care leglislation. I’d second his ambivalent optimism… or maybe Kuttner’s ambivalent pessimism. Some more people are going to be covered under this safety-net-plus-insurance-mandates plan, and it’s worth it for that, but it’s also a half-measure that doesn’t do much to fix an inefficient, […]
Some worthwhile posts on policy issues/from policy blogs today:
Third Decade isn’t buying the justification for local utilities’ rate hikes. I’m not either.
Sterling Newbury rails against wind farm NIMBYism.
Eduwonk advises liberals against pressing the academic freedom too far in public lower ed: "While it might sound like a great idea to let people like […]
Some sage words from Kevin Drum:
Let me be clear: I don’t underestimate the political difficulty of getting universal healthcare enacted. I don’t underestimate how long it will take. But if there’s anything the Democratic Party ought to be united on, it’s the principle of loudly and enthusiastically endorsing universal healthcare as a goal.
So how about […]
Joan Venocchi criticizes the business community’s skirting of its responsibility on health care, with all the moral critique that Charley and others have been bringing to the health care legislation debate.
In her op-ed, though, this seemingly innocent line stuck out: "As business walks away, so, too, does the federal government." She’s talking specifically about the […]
Judging from Charley’s reaction to my post the other day, I may not have been clear in my hypothesis on why the local business community was mobilized politically against any reasonable solution to the crisis in health care provision and its costs. In trying to answer his questions (why don’t they support health care reform? […]
At Blue Mass, Charlie asks why the local business community opposes reasonable attempts to reform health care, despite the rising costs they face in providing health insurance to their employees:
I can’t blame businesses one bit for wanting to get out from under or avoid entirely the crushing weight of health care costs. But for a […]
No, I haven’t forgotten my goal of self-education on foreign policy, but that’s taken the back burner here. At least for this week, a number of local bloggers are talking about health care, particularly in conjunction with a number of legislative and referenda initiatives. Blue Mass Group, organizers of Health Week here in the MA […]
I normally don’t like the genre of cherry-picking conference schedules for ridiculous-sounding workshops, but Oliver Kamm takes a look at the Gay Men’s Health Summit and I have to admit that he has a point. Part of it comes with the cutesy conventions of panel titling ("Bears & Health: Untangling the Fur and the Stethoscope"!), […]
Over at Health Care for All’s blog, John McDonough gripes about Mitt Romney’s policy approach:
I’m old fashioned — and I long for the days when gubernatorial initiatives were accompanied by legislation and detailed policy briefs that spelled out assumptions, numbers, and details. This governor accompanies his pronouncements with zero details, making it impossible […]
I’m currently watching a surreal informercial on Channel 7 peddling a “Natural Cures They Don’t Want You to Know About” book by Kevin Trudeau (not in stores now, sadly). It’s pretty much the worst type of conspiracy mongering that marks some strains of left-critique of both the food and the drug industries. In fact, Fast […]
It’s subscription only, but Cosmo Macero has a piece in today’s Herald on the health care system and the increasing costs it engenders. The problem in his view? Transparency of cost, or rather the lack of it.
Name another transaction where the actual cost of services is routinely disclosed to the consumer only several weeks […]
I’ve had ambivalent feelings about tort reform before: feelings that Republicans are looking at the trees at expense of the forest of health care problems. And feelings that liberal replies that fears of malpractice juggernaut are ill-founded, in fact don’t address whether legal means are the best for allocating limited resources in caring for people’s […]
Chris Mooney points to a short note in the Times about echinacea research and notes,
[Echinacea] doesn’t seem to work to assuage the symptoms or duration of the common cold, as popularly alleged. Just another example of the complementary and alternative medicine craze getting way ahead of the evidence….
And more proof of the utter break […]