Last month, PBS’s Frontline showed a fascinating documentary on the state of health care delivery in five developed countries around the world.
The program is available online. Watch it.
From the introduction,
In Sick Around the World, FRONTLINE teams up with veteran Washington Post foreign correspondent T.R. Reid to find out how five other capitalist democracies — [...]
Jeffrey Birnbaum in the Washington Post. No comment is really required, is it?
The pharmaceutical industry, long an ally of Republicans, has increasingly worked itself into the good graces of the Democratic Party and by doing so has helped block the Democrats’ top prescription-drug initiatives.
In the year since they took over on Capitol Hill, Democratic leaders [...]
An International Update on the Comparative Performance of American Health Care from the Commonwealth Fund:
Overview
Despite having the most costly health system in the world, the United States consistently underperforms on most dimensions of performance, relative to other countries. This report—an update to two earlier editions—includes data from surveys of patients, as well as [...]
(Cleaning out my closet of health-care pieces.)
Ezra Klein points us to a new study comparing Canadian to US health care outcomes.
Canada vs. America
It’s not that the data shows unbelievable advantages for Canada, to be sure. As the authors conclude, “although Canadian outcomes were more often superior to US outcomes than the reverse, neither the United [...]
Reviewing Jonathan Cohn’s book, Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Health Care Crisis—and the People Who Pay the Price, Phillip Longman suggests that we should be looking to the excellent VA hospital system, described in an earlier Longman piece, as opposed to following Cohn’s proposal of making everyone eligible for Medicare.
The key to the cure [...]
The first in a series from The Nation: an article by James K Galbraith, toward a new progressive economic agenda.
In a debate over the Democratic future, no one should confuse the Hamilton Project with the Republican past. Robert Rubin and his associates have invited a broad dialogue on economic inequality and strategic investment, and on [...]
Both Paul Krugman (via Mark Thoma) and Dean Baker have nice things to say about the universal health care plan advanced by presidential candidate John Edwards.
It’s not the cleanest plan in the world (there remains a substantial role for private health insurance, for example), but on the other hand it has some features that set [...]
Dean Baker:
The New York Times had an interesting piece on the poor state of the dental care provided by the British public health care system in its Sunday paper. The article reports that people face long waits for even emergency dental care, and that many now turn to private dentists or go to foreign [...]
Paul Krugman, from behind the NT Times paywall, courtesy of Mark Thoma:
Many pundits see red at the words “single-payer system.” They think it means low-quality socialized medicine; they start telling horror stories — almost all of them false — about the problems of other countries’ health care. Yet there’s nothing foreign or exotic about [...]
Sure, it’s cheaper and better health care. But it’s un-American. Via Kevin Drum:
Advocates of universal healthcare frequently claim that European-style national healthcare systems, aside from being fairer, are just more efficient than ours. They provide decent healthcare at a lower cost than the jumbled, pseudo-free market system we have in the United States.
But is [...]
Via Sam Smith, Shankar Vedantam reporting in the Washington Post:
Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Co. recently funded five studies that compared its antipsychotic drug Zyprexa with Risperdal, a competing drug made by Janssen. All five showed Zyprexa was superior in treating schizophrenia.
But when Janssen sponsored its own studies comparing the two drugs, Risperdal came out [...]
Paul Krugman and Robin wells, writing in the New York Review of Books.
This inefficiency is a bad thing in itself. What makes it literally fatal to thousands of Americans each year is that the inefficiency of our health care system exacerbates a second problem: our health care system often makes irrational choices, and rising costs [...]
The Truth About Universal Health Care: Tyler Zimmer, writing in Campus Progress, has a concise treatment of some of the most often heard myths about UHC.
Myth #1: It would be too expensive
Rather than cost more money, UHC would actually reduce the cost of health care. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that UHC could save [...]
“France is the latest country to fill American conservatives’ need for a foreign boogeyman that will keep liberals in their place.”
“We recognize that patents are a way to provide incentives for research, but where is the economic research that shows that they are the most efficient way? You won’t find it, because economists have mostly chosen to ignore the issue.”
“Our system is desperately in need of reform.”
Healthcare roundup from Ezra Klein and Angry Bear, via Kevin Drum.
When it comes to health care, it’s a government bureaucracy that’s setting the standard for maintaining best practices while reducing costs, and it’s the private sector that’s lagging in quality.
Paul Krugman on demographics, Social Security, and health care.