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While lawmakers are targeting rising costs and growing numbers of uninsured, a new crop of health care-focused documentaries offer a darker, more conspiratorial view: Powerful vested interests lusting for profits are responsible for the country's medical malaise.
Much of the health care reform debate centers on the Democratic push to create a government-run insurance option for working age Americans and their families. But shouldn't policymakers take a hard look at Medicare--the largest health insurance program in the country--before moving ahead to create something similar for everyone else?
The idea of insurance co-ops is gaining ground as an alternative to a government-run plan.
Medicaid's role in health reform is emerging as a flash point, exposing policy and political rifts not only between the two parties but also among Democrats themselves.
Patients who are readmitted to the hospital soon after they're discharged cost the health care system billions of dollars a year in unnecessary spending. These "frequent fliers," as doctors sometimes call them, illustrate the worst aspects of poorly coordinated care. Innovative programs may serve as models for fixing the problems.
A new report proposes a fail-safe mechanism to ensure that any health care overhaul wouldn't add to the federal deficit.
Some experts think incentives will encourage doctors to deliver quality care with fewer resources.
You can sum up Obama's strategy for health reform as "WWCD": What Wouldn't the Clintons Do. And it's working well so far. It seems likely that Obama will have a bill to sign by year's end. But will it be legislation that people actually like?
Earlier this month, lobbyists trooped in to watch as the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions began working on a health-care overhaul - the first congressional panel this year to move so far.
The over-65 crowd, with its outsized political clout, will have a big say in the fate of any health overhaul. And that helps explain a recent agreement on drug discounts involving the pharmaceutical industry, the White House and Congress.
Democrats in Congress, surprised by the high cost estimates for their health care proposals, are looking at a wide range of options for raising money and reducing costs. Some of the revenue raisers have been rejected in previous years, but now all ideas are on the table because of the big amounts needed to pay for a health care overhaul.
Once a senior begins receiving long-term care services, she and her family often are in for two shocks. The first is that Medicare won't pay beyond perhaps a few months after a hospitalization. The second is that while Medicaid, the state-federal program for the poor, may help, chances are it will only do so for nursing home residents.
The Democratic members of three House committees today released a plan they said would lower health care costs and improve health care choices. They plan includes individual as well as employer mandates to buy insurance and would provide for a government-run public plan alternative to private insurance.
The Web site Politics Daily asked two experts to debate perhaps the hottest topic in health reform: Whether to create a government-run insurance plan to compete with private insurance plans. The debaters on the so-called "public option" are Richard Kirsch, national campaign manager for Health Care for America Now and James Gelfand, senior manager of health policy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Everybody knew that a complete overhaul of the nation's health care system was going to be an expensive undertaking.
The Congressional Budget Office took center stage this week when its assessment of a health overhaul plan fueled criticism of its cost. Little known outside of Washington, the CBO is an arbiter of the cost and impact of legislation -- meaning it will continue to play a critical role in the health reform debate. Senate Finance Committee Democrats, meanwhile, vow to re-tool their as-yet-unreleased proposal to make it less costly.
The government shoudn't be the arbiter that makes final decisions on the value of one treatment over another, but can play an important role in collecting and disseminating information about the most effective treatments.
The health care reform discussion is beginning-at last!-to get real. On June 9, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee released a draft bill, and the Congressional Budget Office published an estimate that the bill would cost $1 trillion over 10 years and leave 35 million uninsured.
Three former Senate leaders unveiled a bipartisan health care reform package Wednesday that includes individual and employer mandates, as well as a tax on health benefits.
Sen. Edward Kennedy's Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee on Wednesday becomes the first panel in Congress to formally start work on a bill to overhaul the nation's health system. But Kennedy, still undergoing treatment for brain cancer, won't be there in person to drop the gavel.
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