Health Care Friday 0
- Yesterday, Daily Kos featured two live blogs of interest: Federal Pandemic H1N1 Influenza Summit Today covered the all day summit that reviewed possible H1N1 vaccine recommendations and possible school closures coming down the pike from the Feds.
School-age children will be among the population groups likely to get pandemic H1N1 flu vaccine in the fall, and they may get their shots at schools.
Howard Dean Liveblog: His Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform featured Dr. Dean commenting on his ideas about moving the health reform ball forward.
The bottom line on healthcare reform is that it is not worth doing if it is not done right….
Subsidizing Americans to buy private health insurance without giving them the choice of a more rational and less expensive system is simply pouring money into a system that increases costs at twice the rate of inflation, serves preferentially those who don’t need help, and offers not peace of mind to those at risk in difficult economic times.
In short, the healthcare reform bill is not worth passing unless the American people have the choice of signing up for a public option–a real public option…. If healthcare reform is not the desired outcome, this administration or the Democratic Party or the Congress as a whole should pass guaranteed issue and community rating and be done with it.
- NY Times:
The Obama administration warned Americans on Thursday to be ready for an aggressive return of the swine flu virus in the fall, announcing plans to begin vaccinations in October and offering states and hospitals money to help them prepare.
and
Vaccinations will begin in October only if tests scheduled to begin in August prove that it is safe and effective. Even then, officials expect only tens of millions of doses to be ready, so they will have to decide who gets vaccinated first. The most likely candidates, Ms. Sebelius said, are school children, health care workers, pregnant women and people with asthma or other conditions that make the flu more risky.
- DSCC press release:
Today, as the Obama Administration holds an important summit on flu preparedness at the National Institutes of Health, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is spotlighting Congressman Roy Blunt’s vote against crucial flu pandemic funding. Blunt voted against the Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2009, which appropriated $7.65 billion for flu pandemic funding.
“When it comes to public health, politics should take a back seat,” said Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Communications Director Eric Schultz. “But as a Washington insider, Congressman Roy Blunt cannot help himself. While Congressman Blunt’s busy protecting wasteful pork projects, he’s turning his back on the people who will suffer from H1N1 flu. The people of Missouri deserve better.”
Those funds are badly needed at state level for vaccination programs. It is unfortunate that “just say no” extends to public health. But the larger picture is that public health infrastructure deserves congressional support. There’s nothing wasteful about saving lives, and influenza doesn’t care what party you belong to.
- From the Gates Foundation, a reminder that there are other diseases that matter:
An international network of malaria scientists is to be established to map the emergence of resistance to antimalarial drugs and guide global efforts to control and eradicate the disease, thanks to a $20m (£12.5m) grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The WorldWide Antimalarial Resistance Network (WWARN), which will be administered and supported from Oxford University, will provide the comprehensive and rigorous evidence base needed for policy makers to select the best antimalarial treatments and to formulate strategies to control the critical problem of resistance wherever it arises.
- Shocking news: brilliant scientist appointed to important science post.
It’s official: The White House intends to tap geneticist Francis Collins to lead the National Institutes of Health. President Barack Obama’s announcement today ends months of speculation that Collins, leader of the international Human Genome Project, was about to be named to head the “0.6 billion agency. Collins has been rumored to be interested in the job since he stepped down as director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) last summer.
- Kaiser reports on stalling momentum for a health reform bill, at least in terms of meeting deadlines.
- Drew Westen:
Economists may define “middle class” as the group whose income lies some distance from the mean family income (the average of all households) or the median income (the income level above which half of American families fall below and half above). But in the United States, as surveys over many years have shown, middle class is as much a state of mind as a state of wealth…
As the administration and Congress figure out how to pay for health care reform, they need to bear in mind the meaning of middle class in America, because understanding or failing to do so could make the difference between strong or weak popular support.
- Want to get in the weeds of making health care cheaper and/or figuring out how to pay for it? Here’s a trio of articles from the simple to the interesting to the complex. But any way you look at it, a health system overhaul has to be paid for.
House and Senate Democrats appeared on Thursday to be on a collision course over how to pay for a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system, with the House planning to propose an income tax increase on the wealthiest Americans, an idea that Senate negotiators have all but dismissed as unworkable.
If it were easy, it’d have been done already.
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