Originally published in the Aurora Daily Sentinel, January 29th, 2010. This version has links to references.
Why we're "crazy" about health care choice
By Brian T. Schwartz and Linda Gorman
Sentinel Editor Dave Perry dismisses the Colorado Right to Health Care Choice Initiative as "crazy" and says its supporters "clearly have lost" their ...
Writes Grace-Marie Turner in the Wall Street Journal:
Massachusetts is a problematic model on which to base federal health-care reform because the state relies heavily on Medicaid. Washington in 2008 agreed to provide the state with $10.6 billion over three years as part of its Medicaid waiver request, which allows the ...
From the Dallas Morning News:
As the state seeks ways to trim Medicaid, an increasing number of doctors frustrated with reimbursements are opting not to see new Medicaid patients. As a result, Medicaid patients often grow sicker while hunting for a doctor.
"The inability to find a Medicaid doctor drives up the ...
"Doctors in Colorado began to see reductions in their reimbursements from the Medicaid program on Wednesday as an effort to fill financial gaps in the state’s budget," reports a recent Denver Business Journal article. This could mean higher premiums for those who with a non-government health plan. Last year Bloomberg ...
Medical internist and Professor of Medicine Mark Siegel in the Wall Street Journal:
Here's something that has gotten lost in the drive to institute universal health insurance: Health insurance doesn't automatically lead to health care. And with more and more doctors dropping out of one insurance plan or another, especially government ...
Linda Gorman does a great job pointing out the misconceptions in a Denver Post news article:
"Patients on Medicare or Medicaid do not have insurance. They have government provided health care."
"[S]ince when is it a “major flaw” in the US health care system when people in it withdraw their labor because ...
When politicians decide how to spend taxpayers' money on health care, they spend it on what is most politically popular. Linda Gorman writes that this means less emphasis on "procedures to save lives in immediate danger" and more "preventive care for the healthy and treatment of diseases with active political ...
The Rocky Mountain News has a good, and scary, critique of how Obama's so-called "stimulus" package expands health care entitlements. Funny how this crisis brings on leviathan, as historian Robert Higgs has written. Here's an excerpt:
It would be bad enough if the $800 billion-plus stimulus package - which could pass ...
From the Colorado Health Institute's Pueblo Insurance Study:
Where there are lower income households and more people over age 65, there will be a higher percentage of the population on Medicare, Medicaid and CHP+, resulting in providers needing to shift more costs to commercial payers. In 2005, Pueblo had 41.7% of ...
From a former senior official at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, published last week in the Wall Street Journal:
Accumulating medical data shows that Medicaid recipients' poor health outcomes aren't just a function of their underlying medical problems, but a more direct consequence of the program's shortcomings. Take the ...
