Health: September 2009 Archives

"I voted bipartisanly! LOL"

Earlier this morning, the Senate Finance Committee, headed by Sen. Max "Bipartisanship Over Public Good" Baucus (D-MT), voted down Sen. Jay Rockefeller's (D-WV) relatively robust public option amendment to their version of the health care bill. No Republicans voted for it, and neither did Baucus himself. The Congressional Budget Office caluculated that Rockefeller's public option would have cut $50 billion off the bill's cost over ten years.

And just this afternoon, the committee voted down Sen. Chuck Schumer's (D-NY) more modest public option amendment. From TPMDC:

The Senate Finance Committee can't even endorse a modest public option like Chuck Schumer's. Citing his belief that a public option can't pass on the Senate floor "at this time," Finance chairman Max Baucus joined two Democrats and all Republicans in voting down the amendment, which failed 10 to 13.

Joining Baucus on the Democrats' side of the dais were Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) and, by proxy, Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) who wasn't present for the vote.

There will be no public option in the Finance Committee's health care bill.

There's a couple of chances for the public option -- some public option -- to make an appearance still, either in committee with the Senate HELP version of the bill, or in committee with the House's bill. But this is a serious blow, make no mistake.

And by the way, the guy in the photo at the top? That's Max Baucus. He's the guy, the Democrat, who believed the Republicans when they said they wanted to negotiate in good faith on health care, even though they voted against it, as a unified group, at every single turn. I'll let you decide whom to hold accountable for the public option's sinking: the rats, or the captain who let the rats take a turn steering?

(Photo by Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images North America)

Written by Jamilah King, this post originally appeared on WireTap.

Here's another 'why' young people really do care about healthcare reform.

This week, 22-year-old recent Miami University of Ohio grad Kimberly Young died from complications of the H1M1 virus. While a lot of the "swine flu" hysteria has centered on an uncontrollable disease that hits patients before they get a chance to get help, Young knew immediately to go to a hospital. Except she didn't -- because she didn't have health insurance.

Young became sick about two weeks ago. Like many uninsured young folks, she tried to stick it out until this past Tuesday, when friends rushed her to University of Cincinnati hospital in critical condition. She died later that night.

Since the beginning of the healthcare debate, Sarah Palin has publicly decried the end-of-life option in healthcare reform as a “death panel." She wrote about it on Facebook and recently went off about it in China. But what she doesn’t know is that as she ranted in Hong Kong, a group of undocumented patients in Georgia had already gone up against the panel and, like many undocumented people before them looking for medical care, got some really, really hard news.

Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, GA told 51 poor and undocumented patients in its outpatient dialysis clinic that they needed to leave by this Saturday. Another 40 patients who have papers, but no money to afford treatment elsewhere, will be following them.

The Fulton County court ordered for the hospital to be closed saying they were not convinced that the patients, suffering from failing kidneys, had a constitutional right to the court’s relief, leaving the patients and their families in devastation.

Senator Vincent Fort with the Grady Coalition Advocacy group put it frankly:

“People are talking about death panels. The real death panels occurred here at Grady, when people were told to go and die.”

The media has circulating a haunting figure in recent days:45,000 deaths due to lack of health insurance—a grim marker of the depth of the country's health care crisis.

The statistic, from a new study by Harvard School of Medicine researchers, reflects projections based on government data on more than 9,000 individuals tracked over a number of years. Basically, we live in a country where about 46 million people don't have health coverage, and drawing from government medical and census data, researchers calculate that this trend was tied to “approximately 44789 deaths among Americans aged 18 to 64 years in 2005.” The link between insurance and death held steady even after controlling for various socioeconomic, racial and health factors.” (A handy chart tells you how many of those dead folks are from your home state.)

But when you factor those other characteristics in, a different sort of picture emerges. In the study sample, the Black uninsured rate, 23 percent, was nearly double that of whites. Nearly half of Mexican Americans were uninsured. Interestingly, the death rate for Blacks was significantly higher compared to Whites, but not for Mexican Americans.

Thank you, celebrities, for fighting for what's right:

And for those of you who are textual learners, here's some historical and metaphorical perspective from the always-on-point never-not-blunt Milt Shook at Please... Cut The Crap!:

Imagine your brother-in-law came to you and said, "Send me $18,000 per year, and I'll keep it for you. Whenever you need money to spend, just come to me, and I'll pay the bill for you, as long as I approve of the item you plan to buy. Then, at the end of the year, whatever you haven't spent, I get to keep."

Would you take that deal, or would you laugh at him and suggest to your wife that he be committed?

...

The Obama Plan in 4 Minutes from White House on Vimeo.

Learn the basic principles of President Obama's health insurance reform plan as presented to Congress on September 9, 2009.

Tuesday was Joe “You Lie” Wilson's day of reckoning. Following his temper tantrum during Obama's address on healthcare reform, the House, by a 240-179 vote, issued this stinging rebuke:

Whereas on September 9, 2009, during the joint session of Congress convened pursuant to House Concurrent Resolution 179, the President of the United States, speaking at the invitation of the House and Senate, had his remarks interrupted by the Representative from South Carolina, Mr. Wilson; and

Whereas the conduct of the Representative from South Carolina was a breach of decorum and degraded the proceedings of the joint session, to the discredit of the House: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved, That the House of Representatives disapproves of the behavior of the Representative from South Carolina, Mr. Wilson, during the joint session of Congress held on September 9, 2009.

A week out from President Obama’s healthcare speech and I’m still angry. This feels eerily like the first year of the Clinton Presidency, when we were so sick of Reagan and Bush that we willingly embraced dubious change at best.

President Obama campaigned on change, and indeed, there are some positive aspects to the Obama Plan for healthcare. But the Left has already conceded too much: No funding for abortions, public option on shaky ground at best, single payer about as likely as contact with alien life, coverage for undocumented people completely off the table. And yet, we’re grateful for anything but the system we currently have?

In the meantime, the Right is scoring all kinds of points off categorically untrue accusations of Death Panels! Socialism! Illegal Immigrants! And the only people truly excited about healthcare reform are the insurance companies, who are fighting in lock-step with the Republican Party for the status quo.

It seems to me that we can fight the good fight with facts, figures, frameworks, and impact statements – and this is necessary work. But we need our own rallying cry to staunch the flow of Right-wing fear mongering. And we shouldn’t be constrained by truth, because our opponents certainly aren’t. It doesn’t even seem to matter what, as long as it pulls on someone’s heartstrings – anybody remember “No Blood for Oil?”

So what’s our answer to “Socialism?” Is it End the Republican: Industracare? Wealth Care? Big Box Care? Whites-only Care? Status Quo Care? No Care?

Whatever it is, I posit that we should think hard and fast, and start shouting it out now. Because it’s not just a war of facts and policy, but a war of words that we’re losing.

The latest uptick in the uninsured population, now exceeding 46 million, is bad but anticipated news. The racial and socioeconomic disparities within the health care gap are more disturbing—especially in the state that could serve as a model for national reform.

Since Massachusetts rolled out its “universal” healthcare plan in 2006--basically mandating people to sign up for state-subsidized or private insurance--officials have viewed the program as a petri dish for market-based reforms. But critics say the Massachusetts experiment mostly reveals the inherent weakness of incremental reform in the face of a volatile, profit-centered insurance market.

Haw haw! That Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC)! Yelling at the President, like a real clown! What a chump! That's no way to get things done HEY HUH WHA

"We really thought we'd resolved this question of people who are here illegally, but as we reflected on the President's speech last night we wanted to go back and drill down again," said Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND), according to Time. The incident reportedly has led Finance chairman Max Baucus to insert a provision in his legislation to require participants in the health insurance exchanges to provide proof of citizenship. (TPMDC, and here)

What? But that loophole didn't exist in the first place -- undocumented immigrants could buy insurance with their own money (of course), but weren't eligible for any subsidies.

Right now it's not clear exactly what this new legislation would mean, should it make it into the combined version of the bill. But the lack of distinction between documented and undocumented immigrants is troubling, as is barring the undocumented from the President's proposed 'pool' of residents using their collective power to bargain with insurance companies. Forget subsidies for a second, and imagine how much more heft that group would have if the undocumented were a part of it! Everyone would benefit (except the insurance companies)!

And then there's the disenfranchising effect of having to produce even more paperwork to get promised subsidies. Ezra Klein says:

It's a very bad idea because the people you most need to reach — low-income folks, and the unemployed, and legal immigrants — are the least likely to have easy access to documentation and the most likely to get scared off by a lot of paperwork requirements. Any illegal immigrant interested in defrauding the government can get some forged papers and participate, just as happens now. But plenty of the people we actually want to participate will be barred because they haven't updated their ID recently, and they lost their Social Security card years ago.

Klein has since edited this post, since it's been clarified that documentation would be required for subsidies, not just to purchase insurance, which would be an absolutely nightmare. But what he's describing here will apply to the subsidy application process too. It punishes the people that we claim we're doing this to benefit.

Also, Ezra, why are you still saying "illegal" instead of "undocumented"?

Just who was that shrill voice heckling the President from the gallery at tonight's healthcare reform speech?

None other than Joe Wilson, Republican of South Carolina and vaunted protector of American borders and American values. Wilson's latest contribution to the civic discourse was shouting “You Lie!” in response to Obama's umpteenth reiteration that nothing in the emerging reform legislation would extend healthcare to undocumented immigrants.

Carl Hulse of the New York Times reports that even White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, a notorious Washington hardass, seemed taken aback:

“No president ever has been treated like that, ever,” Mr. Emanuel told reporters.

Well, we've never had a president quite like this one, have we?

Wilson's sneering outburst, hardly his first, clearly ignores the fact that the Obama administration has bent over backwards to deny that its reform plan would accommodate undocumented immigrants. But what else besides thin air might be informing Wilson's allegation?

As President Obama prepares to address Congress tonight (8PM EST), the public option's future seems dim, but not extinguished. Obama is expected to endorse it, but at this point, even the most liberal of proposed HCR bills has a less-than-robust version of the much-debated government program.

Talks in the 'Gang of Six,' the bipartisan committee drafting the Senate's HCR bill, have fallen apart, and Democrat Sen. Baucus is dissolving the committee. This is a good thing, since Sen. Grassley and Sen. Enzi, two Republican members, had made it all but explicit that they were only there to barricade proceedings with a smile. Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, the third Republican member of the committee, had found herself in a position of power as the only Republican willing to listen to anyone, and thus the focus of everyone's attention. She came out against the public option today, in favor of a 'trigger,' something insurance companies have been pushing -- but since the committee is dead, it doesn't really matter.

Baucus has come out with a bill, which is good, because that means he's not just sitting on HCR until it dies. It's not great, though, because man, the bill is pretty bad, relatively speaking (and objectively speaking!). Still -- a terrible bill is better than stalling the entire process to death.

Ezra Klein explains the rest of the process:

... [H]ealth-care reform is in pretty good shape. Bills have now passed four of the five relevant committees. The outlier committee, the Senate Finance Committee, is circulating its outline and seems likely to pass a bill within the next week or so.

At that point, the bills will go to the floor of the House and Senate, where passage isn't certain but seems pretty likely. And once the bills pass the House and the Senate, final passage of the conference report (the merged bill) is a good bet. And the president's signature is then a sure thing.

by Marty Martinez, policy director of the California Pan-Ethnic Health Network.

As a fundamental part of their response to the H1N1 epidemic, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) instructs people who get sick to “stay home from work or school” to keep from infecting others. But for the nearly six million Californians who work for employers that don't provide paid sick days, this is easier said than done. In the face of a flu epidemic, these workers are asked to make an incredibly difficult choice – between following medical advice or losing pay, between keeping a job or not infecting others.

With more than one-third of flu cases transmitted in schools and workplaces, effective strategies to help workers stay home when infected could save a significant number of lives and avoid unnecessary heath care costs. Right now, however, workplace disparities make us all vulnerable to endemic disease.
 
The United States remains alone among developed and prosperous Western nations in not guaranteeing this basic right for its workers. But the right to paid sick days is more than an employment benefit; it is, fundamentally, a strategy to protect the health of everyone. Local health departments in California reported almost 900 disease outbreaks involving food between 2003 and 2007 involving about 16,000 cases of illness.  The vast majority of these outbreaks occurred in institutional and workplace settings such as restaurants, schools, and day care settings.

Almost 2000 of these cases were connected to food-handling by an infected person. Yet in California, 70% of workers in our restaurants and food establishments do not have paid sick days, creating a barrier to diagnosis and treatment and a disincentive to taking time off work. 

Congress returns from recess tomorrow and Obama might have a major healthcare reform announcement to make and it may have a little something to do with the public option. If you don't understand what the public option is, here is one more video explaining what the showdown is all about.

Reich also has a good write up on his own personal blog that looks at the history of health care reform. Below is a snippet from "The Lessons from History on Health Care Reform"

Universal health care has bedeviled, eluded or defeated every president for the last 75 years. Franklin Roosevelt left it out of Social Security because he was afraid it would be too complicated and attract fierce resistance. Harry Truman fought like hell for it but ultimately lost. Dwight Eisenhower reshaped the public debate over it. John Kennedy was passionate about it. Lyndon Johnson scored the first and last major victory on the road toward achieving it. Richard Nixon devised the essential elements of all future designs for it. Jimmy Carter tried in vain to re-engineer it. The first George Bush toyed with it. Bill Clinton lost it and then never mentioned it again. George W. expanded it significantly, but only for retirees.

A recent article in the LA Times is reporting that scientists have discovered two antibodies in the body that can keep HIV from multiplying into a severe infection.

The news comes just months after a report found that 3 percent of people were living with HIV/Aids in Washington DC, calling it a severe epidemic. Out of that 3 percent, more than 76 percent are Black, 70 percent are men and 70 percent are age 40 and older.

From the article at LA Times:

Crucial to the discovery is the fact that the antibodies target a portion of HIV that researchers had not considered in their search for a vaccine. Moreover, the target is a relatively stable portion of the virus that does not participate in the extensive mutations that have made HIV able to escape from antiviral drugs and previous experimental vaccines.

While this is a great scientific discovery, the barriers to accessing this kind of info and getting the services needed to combat HIV/Aids in communities of color are still significant. Let's not forget that CA's governator cut millions from HIV/Aids programs causing many mostly low-income people who relied on those services to look for dwindling alternatives and not to mention the number of employees (frequently former street workers living with HIV/Aids) who are now looking for new work.

Scientific discoveries for a "cure" to HIV/Aids only means so much if we don't have the proper resources to make sure that people living with HIV have access to proper services and support.

The Department of Health and Human Services is having a video contest to raise awareness about the H1N1 virus. Here's an entry by Dr. John Clarke, MD, AKA The Physician Musician, that I think does a great job of kicking off a discussion about epidemiology and race.

While we all know that Spring Breakers and factory farms are responsible for swine flu, we also know that the neighborhoods that get hit the hardest by another outbreak will be the ones least able to defend themselves.

So what will H1N1 do to communities of color? WIth health care under constant attack, and state budgets cutting health services in lieu of cutting corporate welfare, what will it take for the disease to turn endemic? And how soon after that will it get taken seriously? How many jobs will be lost due to a child needing care at home? How will attitudes toward vaccines complicate outreach efforts? And how about those in our communities with family in other countries?

H1N1 is preventable and treatable — so how do we ensure that everyone has the resources to prevent and treat it? Educators within the community, like Dr. Clarke, are a great start, but this is one problem that sick freestyles can't solve alone.

h/t PostBourgie.