Health Coverage Quotes

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The trouble is that when we get around to solutions, it always seems to come down to Prozac. Or Zoloft. Or Paxil. Deep clinical depression is a disease, one that not only can, but probably should, be treated with drugs. But a low-grade terminal anomie, a sense of alienation or disgust and detachment, the collective horror at a world that seems to have gone so very wrong, is not a job for antidepressants. The trouble is, the big-picture problems that have so many people down are more or less insoluble: As long as people can get divorced they will get divorced; America=s shrinking economy is not reversible; there is no cure for AIDS. So it starts to seem fairly reasonable to anesthetize ourselves in the best possible way. I would like so much to say that Prozac is preventing many people who are not clinically depressed from finding real antidotes to what Hillary Clinton refers to as 'a sleeping sickness of the soul,' but what exactly would those solutions be? I mean, universal health care coverage and a national service draft would be nice, but neither one is going to save us from ourselves. Just as our parents quieted us when we were noisy by putting us in front of the television set, maybe we're now learning to quiet our own adult noise with Prozac.
Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation)
I don't care if they are reading our mail. Bring it on, Tron! I dare you. Try to take away my freedom of expression. I'm a journalist. A free-speech warrior. I serve in the Army of the First Amendment. I didn't take this job for the bad money, and the regressive health care coverage. I'm here for the truth, the sunshine, the casting open of closed doors!
Rainbow Rowell (Attachments)
Fewer and fewer large and medium-sized companies offer their workers full health-care coverage—74 percent did in 1980, under 10 percent do today. As a result, health insurance premiums, co-payments, and deductibles are soaring.
Robert B. Reich (Beyond Outrage)
Do you work a job that slowly kills you so you can afford health coverage to pay medical expenses? Or do you live right with the earth and make your own way, keep things simple, and take care of yourself?
Kim Heacox (Only Kayak: A Journey into the Heart of Alaska)
A Harris/Harvard School of Public Health poll of 1989 showed that most Americans (61 percent) favored a Canadian-type health system, in which the government was the single payer to doctors and hospitals, bypassing the insurance companies, and offering universal medical coverage to everyone. Neither the Democratic nor the Republican party adopted that as its program, although both insisted they wanted to “reform” the health system.
Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States)
The only bill not overdue was for my health insurance. That’s because I don’t have any. Never have. Based on the figure the federal government claims is the average monthly cost of health coverage for someone like me who is self-employed, I’ve saved about $200,000 since opening Spirits in Clay. I
J. Michael Orenduff (The Pot Thief Who Studied Georgia O'Keeffe (A Pot Thief Mystery #7))
The value of land may be determined by how it can be used. For example, it may contain valuable resources such as water, minerals, tillable soil, timber or wildlife. There also may be commercial value in the natural attraction of land such as caves, lakes or trails. Land value can be reduced by erosion, flood, earthquake, fire or regulation.
Marshall Wilson Reavis III (Insurance: Concepts & Coverage: Property, Liability, Life, Health and Risk Management)
New Rule: Not everything in America has to make a profit. If conservatives get to call universal health care "socialized medicine," I get to call private, for-profit health care "soulless vampire bastards making money off human pain." Now, I know what you're thinking: "But, Bill, the profit motive is what sustains capitalism." Yes, and our sex drive is what sustains the human species, but we don't try to fuck everything. It wasn't that long ago when a kid in America broke his leg, his parents took him to the local Catholic hospital, the nun stuck a thermometer in his ass, the doctor slapped some plaster on his ankle, and you were done. The bill was $1.50; plus, you got to keep the thermometer. But like everything else that's good and noble in life, some bean counter decided that hospitals could be big business, so now they're not hospitals anymore; they're Jiffy Lubes with bedpans. The more people who get sick, and stay sick, the higher their profit margins, which is why they're always pushing the Jell-O. Did you know that the United States is ranked fiftieth in the world in life expectancy? And the forty-nine loser countries were they live longer than us? Oh, it's hardly worth it, they may live longer, but they live shackled to the tyranny of nonprofit health care. Here in America, you're not coughing up blood, little Bobby, you're coughing up freedom. The problem with President Obama's health-care plan isn't socialism. It's capitalism. When did the profit motive become the only reason to do anything? When did that become the new patriotism? Ask not what you could do for your country, ask what's in it for Blue Cross Blue Shield. And it's not just medicine--prisons also used to be a nonprofit business, and for good reason--who the hell wants to own a prison? By definition, you're going to have trouble with the tenants. It's not a coincidence that we outsourced running prisons to private corporations and then the number of prisoners in America skyrocketed. There used to be some things we just didn't do for money. Did you know, for example, there was a time when being called a "war profiteer" was a bad thing? FDR said he didn't want World War II to create one millionaire, but I'm guessing Iraq has made more than a few executives at Halliburton into millionaires. Halliburton sold soldiers soda for $7.50 a can. They were honoring 9/11 by charging like 7-Eleven. Which is wrong. We're Americans; we don't fight wars for money. We fight them for oil. And my final example of the profit motive screwing something up that used to be good when it was nonprofit: TV news. I heard all the news anchors this week talk about how much better the news coverage was back in Cronkite's day. And I thought, "Gee, if only you were in a position to do something about it.
Bill Maher (The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass)
And this affects us. Consider, immediately after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, researchers from the University of California, Irvine, investigated two groups. The first group was made up of people who watched six or more hours of televised bombing coverage. The second group was people who actually ran in the 2013 Boston Marathon. The finding: The first group, the bombing news bingers, were more likely to develop PTSD and other mental health issues. That’s worth restating: people who binge-watched bombing news on TV from the comfort of home had more psychological trauma than people who were actually bombed.
Michael Easter (Scarcity Brain: Fix Your Craving Mindset and Rewire Your Habits to Thrive with Enough)
Cooperative Care in Wisconsin, which provides care to the elderly, was able to give its 81 members in 2004 relatively high pay, workers’ compensation, ten days’ paid vacation, and 50 to 75 percent health insurance coverage, all only three years after beginning operations.79 Similarly, Cooperative Home Care Associates in the Bronx, New York, founded in 1985, offers its 1700 members “significantly better pay and working conditions than most home health aides.”80
Chris Wright (Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States)
And although better coverage of the outbreak’s evolution in the press couldn’t have stopped the influenza virus, a single newspaper headline in Philadelphia saying “Don’t Go to Any Parades; for the Love of God Cancel Your Stupid Parade” could have saved hundreds of lives. It would have done a lot more than those telling people, “Don’t Get Scared!” Telling people that things are fine is not the same as making them fine. This failure is in the past. Journalists and editors had their reasons. Risking jail time is no joke. But learning from this breakdown in truth-telling is important because the fourth estate can’t fail again. We are fortunate today to have organizations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization that track how diseases are progressing and report these findings. In the event of an outbreak similar to the Spanish flu, they will be wonderful resources. I hope we’ll be similarly lucky to have journalists who will be able to share necessary information with the public. The public is at its strongest when it is well informed. Despite Lippmann’s claims to the contrary, we are smart, and we are good, and we are always stronger when we work together. If there is a next time, it would be very much to our benefit to remember that.
Jennifer Wright (Get Well Soon: History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them)
He'd [Steve Burd] gotten hooked on the subject after realizing that Safeway's rising medical costs threatened to someday bankrupt the company if he didn't do something to tame them. He'd pioneered innovative wellness and preventive health programs for his employees and became an advocate for universal health coverage, making him one of the only Republican CEOs to embrace many of the tenets of Obamacare. Like Dr. J, he was serious about his own health. He worked out on a treadmill at five every morning and lifted weights in the evenings after dinner.
John Carreyrou (Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup)
One American in seven has no coverage, and one in three younger than sixty-five will lose coverage at some point in the next two years. These are people who aren't poor or old enough to qualify for government programs but whose jobs aren't good enough to provide benefits either.
Atul Gawande (Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance)
The impact on our health barely rates any media coverage, even though that’s the part of a changing climate that will hit us the hardest in the near future. The United States has neglected to support research into the health consequences of climate change, according to a 2009 report
Linda Marsa (Fevered: Why a Hotter Planet Will Hurt Our Health -- and how we can save ourselves)
Such trends lifted the overall well-being of many Kentuckians and particularly helped people who suffered from what are oddly called preexisting conditions like hepatitis C—oddly, in my opinion, because “preexisting” assumes that a person’s existence begins at the consummation of health insurance coverage.
Jonathan M. Metzl (Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland)
Later, everybody agreed the baths should have been closed sooner; they agreed health education should have been more direct and more timely. And everybody also agreed blood banks should have tested blood sooner, and that a search for the AIDS virus should have been started sooner, and that scientists should have laid aside their petty intrigues. Everybody subsequently agreed that the news media should have offered better coverage of the epidemic much earlier, and that the federal government should have done much, much more. By the time everyone agreed to all this, however, it was too late. Instead people died. Tens of thousands of them.
Randy Shilts (And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic)
We complain bitterly when we do not get all we want as if it were possible to have more services with lower taxes, broader health care coverage with no federal involvement, a cleaner environment without regulations, security from terrorists with no infringement on privacy, and cheaper consumer goods made locally by workers with higher wages.
Madeleine K. Albright (Fascism: A Warning)
The murder of a child by a parent is horrific and is usually complicated by serious mental illness, as in the Yates and Smith cases. But these cases also tend to create distortions and bias. Police and prosecutors have been influenced by the media coverage, and a presumption of guilt has now fallen on thousands of women—particularly poor women in difficult circumstances—whose children die unexpectedly. Despite America's preeminent status among developed nations, we have always struggled with high rates of infant mortality—much higher than in most developed countries. The inability of many poor women to get adequate health care, including prenatal and post-partum care, has been a serious problem in this country for decades. Even with recent improvements, infant mortality rates continue to be an embarrassment for a nation that spends more on health care than any other country in the world. The criminalization of infant mortality and the persecution of poor women whose children die have taken on new dimensions in twenty-first-century America, as prisons across the country began to bear witness.
Bryan Stevenson (Just Mercy)
Democrats are so keen on these “reforms,” why don’t they pursue them through the normal political channels? Why don’t the Democrats campaign to change the immigration laws? Go ahead and pass laws that allow open borders. Go ahead and limit or eliminate enforcement. Go ahead and mandate health coverage for illegals and all of Mexico, if you want to go that far. If it’s “democratic socialism” they are trying to impose, then do it through the democratic process. Yet interestingly the Democratic left seems to have no interest in this. Rather, they are in open defiance of existing laws. They portray enforcement of those laws, in a difficult atmosphere where they are flagrantly violated, as hateful, racist and Nazi-like betrayals of basic human decency. While exposing the holding facilities as overcrowded and understaffed, they work with activists in Central American countries to further overwhelm those facilities, apparently seeking the chaos that makes effective administration of the immigration laws more difficult so that more illegals get through.
Dinesh D'Souza (United States of Socialism: Who's Behind It. Why It's Evil. How to Stop It.)
I acknowledge readily that the Grant Study is not the only great prospective longitudinal lifetime study. There are others, three of which are better known than ours. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses. The Berkeley and Oakland Growth Studies (1930–2009) from the University of California at Berkeley include both sexes and began when the participants were younger; they provide more sophisticated childhood psychosocial data but little medical information.5 These cohorts have been very intensively studied, but they are smaller and have suffered greater attrition than ours. The Framingham Study (1946 to the present) and the Nurses Study at the Harvard School of Public Health (1976 to the present) boast better physical health coverage, but they lack psychosocial data.6 These are wonderful world-class studies, invaluable in their own ways, and more frequently cited than the Grant Study. But even in this august company the Grant Study is unmistakable and unique. It has been funded continuously for more than seventy years; it has had the highest number of contacts with its members and the lowest attrition rate of all; it has interviewed three generations of relatives; and, most
George E. Vaillant (Triumphs of Experience)
It was assumed we would never discuss the glaring inconsistencies between the public narratives spun around our startup customers and the stories that their data told: if we were to read breathless, frothy tech-blog coverage about companies we suspected were failing, we would only smile and close the tab. It was assumed that if we had a publicly traded company using our software—and, if so moved, could chart the overall health of that public company based on its data set, or build out predictive models of when its overall value might grow or recede—we would resist buying or selling its stock.
Anna Wiener (Uncanny Valley)
While poutine is a dish unique to Eastern Canada (Montreal and Ottawa), the concoction of French fries covered in cheese curds and (for no apparent reason) gravy, clearly deciphers Canadian culture. First, heart-blocking poutine is the easiest explanation for Canada’s adoption of universal health care coverage. I’m pretty sure I’m still digesting the poutine I had in May 2006. Poutine also serves as a sedative, making you so drowsy and serene you find yourself saying “a-boot” instead of “about.” The extra pounds you immediately gain help shield you against the bitter climate. The irrational love of hockey still remains a mystery to me, but I’m convinced it has something to do with poutine.
Jim Gaffigan (Food: A Love Story)
The authors analyzed 695 news items. The content of 47.9% (n = 333) of the articles was not strictly related to mental illness, but rather clinical or psychiatric terms were used metaphorically, and frequently in a pejorative sense. The remaining 52.1% (n = 362) consisted of news items related specifically to mental illness. Of these, news items linking mental illness to danger were the most common (178 texts, 49.2%), specifically those associating mental illness with violent crime (130 texts, 35.9%) or a danger to others (126 texts, 34.8%). The results confirm the hypothesis that the press treats mental illness in a manner that encourages stigmatization. The authors appeal to the press's responsibility to society and advocate an active role in reducing the stigma towards mental illness. Reinforcing Stigmatization: Coverage of Mental Illness in Spanish Newspapers. Journal of Health Communication: International Perspectives. Volume 19, Issue 11, 2014
Enric Aragonès
• Auto and Homeowner Insurance—Choose higher deductibles in order to save on premiums. With high liability limits, these are the best buys in the insurance world. • Life Insurance—Purchase twenty-year level term insurance equal to about ten times your income. Term insurance is cheap and the only way to go; never use life insurance as a place to save money. • Long-Term Disability—If you are thirty-two years old, you are twelve times more likely to become disabled than to die by age sixty-five. The best place to buy disability insurance is through work at a fraction of the cost. You can usually get coverage that equals from 50 to 70 percent of your income. • Health Insurance—The number one cause of bankruptcy today is medical bills; number two is credit cards. One way to control costs is to look for large deductibles to lower your premium. The HSA (Health Savings Account) is a great way to save on premiums. The high deductible creates a much lower premium, and this plan allows you to save for medical expenses in a tax-free savings account.
Dave Ramsey (The Total Money Makeover: Classic Edition: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness)
Take Canada again: why does Canada have the health-care program it does? Up until the mid-1960s, Canada and the United States had the same capitalist health service: extremely inefficient, tons of bureaucracy, huge administrative costs, millions of people with no insurance coverage―exactly what would be amplified in the United States by Clinton's proposals for "managed competition" [put forward in 1993].21 But in 1962 in Saskatchewan, where the N.D.P. is pretty strong and the unions are pretty strong, they managed to put through a kind of rational health-care program of the sort that every industrialized country in the world has by now, except the United States and South Africa. Well, when Saskatchewan first put through that program, the doctors and the insurance companies and the business community were all screaming―but it worked so well that pretty soon all the other Provinces wanted the same thing too, and within a couple years guaranteed health care had spread over the entire country. And that happened largely because of the New Democratic Party in Canada, which does provide a kind of cover and a framework within which popular organizations like unions, and then later things like the feminist movement, have been able to get together and do things.
Noam Chomsky (Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky)
In March 2002, the National Academy of Sciences, a private, nonprofit society of scholars, released a high-profile report documenting the unequivocal existence of racial bias in medical care, which many thought would mark a real turning point. Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care was so brutal and damning that it would seem impossible to turn away. The report, authored by a committee of mostly white medical educators, nurses, behavioral scientists, economists, health lawyers, sociologists, and policy experts, took an exhaustive plunge into more than 480 previous studies. Because of the knee-jerk tendency to assume that health disparities were the end result of differences in class, not race, they were careful to compare subjects with similar income and insurance coverage. The report found rampant, widespread racial bias, including that people of color were less likely to be given appropriate heart medications or to undergo bypass surgery or receive kidney dialysis or transplants. Several studies revealed significant racial differences in who receives appropriate cancer diagnostic tests and treatments, and people of color were also less likely to receive the most sophisticated treatments for HIV/AIDS. These inequities, the report concluded, contribute to higher death rates overall for Black people and other people of color and lower survival rates compared with whites suffering from comparable illnesses of similar severity.
Linda Villarosa (Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives (Pulitzer Prize Finalist))
Chapter 17   I was on my way from Rambam Hospital to Tiberias, when the news first came across the radio about a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. Maggie was still at the Hematology  Ward. I tried to imagine how she felt listening to the news. Surely she was as shocked as everyone else. There in the ward, patients were fighting for their lives, and now in another place in the country, people had perished in seconds. The entire country was horrified by the horrible scenes that aired on all the media. Gradually, the magnitude of the disaster started to be known. A suicide bomber detonated a charge inside a bus, while travelers were going up and down the bus at the heart of the city. It was a few minutes before nine in the morning. There were over twenty dead and dozens wounded. At home, sitting in front of the TV, I watched the extensive coverage. This transition from the sick atmosphere of the hospital in the morning, to the atmosphere of the evening suicide bombing, was depressing. The TV coverage was painful and brought an atmosphere of sadness. I had a feeling that the broadcast intended to clarify to all the people who were still healthy  that their health would not help them. That their end could come just as it did to those victims of the terrorism act on the bus. People did not stop thinking about the event, and the harsh images which were shown repeatedly on the television. Reporters broadcasted from the scene in heightened excitement and everything was filmed live. It seemed that someone was afraid, lest, God forbid, there would be a single person in the country who did not watch this horror. It was appalling. It was one of the first suicide bombings in Israel, and perhaps one of the largest ones.
Nahum Sivan (Till We Say Goodbye)
If you're involved in a motorcycle accident, this can result in devastating injuries, permanent disability or perhaps put you on on-going dependency on healthcare care. In that case, it's prudent to make use of Los Angeles motorcycle accident attorneys to assist safeguard your legal rights if you are a victim of a motorcycle accident. How a san diego car accident attorney Aids An experienced attorney will help you, if you're an injured motorcycle rider or your family members in case of a fatal motorcycle accident. Hence, a motorcycle accident attorney assists you secure complete and commensurate compensation because of this of accident damages. In the event you go it alone, an insurance coverage company may possibly take benefit and that's why you'll need to have a legal ally by your side till the case is settled to your satisfaction. If well represented after a motorcycle collision, you may get compensation for: Present and future lost income: If just after motor cycle injury you cannot perform and earn as just before, you deserve compensation for lost income. This also applies for a loved ones that has a lost a bread-winner following a fatal motorcycle crash. Existing and future healthcare costs, rehabilitation and therapy: these consist of any health-related fees incurred because of this of the accident. Loss of capability to take pleasure in life, pain and mental anguish: a motorcycle crash can lessen your good quality of life if you cannot stroll, run, see, hear, drive, or ride any longer. That is why specialists in motor cycle injury law practice will help with correct evaluation of your predicament and exercise a commensurate compensation. As a result, usually do not hesitate to speak to Los Angeles motorcycle accident attorneys in case you are involved in a motor cycle accident. The professionals will help you file a case within a timely fashion also as expedite evaluation and compensation. This could also work in your favor if all parties involved agree to an out-of-court settlement, in which case you incur fewer costs.
Securing Legal Assist in a Motorcycle Accident
1. Divine Writing: The Bible, down to the details of its words, consists of and is identical with God’s very own words written inerrantly in human language. 2. Total Representation: The Bible represents the totality of God’s communication to and will for humanity, both in containing all that God has to say to humans and in being the exclusive mode of God’s true communication.[11] 3. Complete Coverage: The divine will about all of the issues relevant to Christian belief and life are contained in the Bible.[12] 4. Democratic Perspicuity: Any reasonably intelligent person can read the Bible in his or her own language and correctly understand the plain meaning of the text.[13] 5. Commonsense Hermeneutics: The best way to understand biblical texts is by reading them in their explicit, plain, most obvious, literal sense, as the author intended them at face value, which may or may not involve taking into account their literary, cultural, and historical contexts. 6. Solo Scriptura:[14] The significance of any given biblical text can be understood without reliance on creeds, confessions, historical church traditions, or other forms of larger theological hermeneutical frameworks, such that theological formulations can be built up directly out of the Bible from scratch. 7. Internal Harmony: All related passages of the Bible on any given subject fit together almost like puzzle pieces into single, unified, internally consistent bodies of instruction about right and wrong beliefs and behaviors. 8. Universal Applicability: What the biblical authors taught God’s people at any point in history remains universally valid for all Christians at every other time, unless explicitly revoked by subsequent scriptural teaching. 9. Inductive Method: All matters of Christian belief and practice can be learned by sitting down with the Bible and piecing together through careful study the clear “biblical” truths that it teaches. The prior nine assumptions and beliefs generate a tenth viewpoint that—although often not stated in explications of biblicist principles and beliefs by its advocates—also commonly characterizes the general biblicist outlook, particularly as it is received and practiced in popular circles: 10. Handbook Model: The Bible teaches doctrine and morals with every affirmation that it makes, so that together those affirmations comprise something like a handbook or textbook for Christian belief and living, a compendium of divine and therefore inerrant teachings on a full array of subjects—including science, economics, health, politics, and romance.[15]
Christian Smith (The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture)
Every year some 150 million people face severe financial hardship and 100 million are pushed below the poverty line because they fall ill, use health services, and pay out of pocket.
The Lancet (The Lancet: Universal Health Coverage: Global Health Series)
Similar irrational protests, set amidst equally tragic social consequences from health-care impoverishment, are taking place around the world, including the USA.
The Lancet (The Lancet: Universal Health Coverage: Global Health Series)
The paradox of health care is that it is one of the most powerful ways of fighting poverty, yet can itself become an impoverishing factor for families when societies do not ensure effective coverage
The Lancet (The Lancet: Universal Health Coverage: Global Health Series)
Good quality health delivery systems with universal access protect individuals from illness, stimulate economic growth, and fight poverty by keeping people healthy. They also contribute to social harmony by providing assurance to the population that services are available
The Lancet (The Lancet: Universal Health Coverage: Global Health Series)
When health-care costs represent more than 10% of a household’s total consumption they are called catastrophic payments. For more than 5·1% of Indian households this is their reality.
The Lancet (The Lancet: Universal Health Coverage: Global Health Series)
early cross-country studies generally reported weak evidence of a health spending effect on mortality indicators, whereas socioeconomic factors—especially income—often proved to be highly associated with health outcomes.15–17
The Lancet (The Lancet: Universal Health Coverage: Global Health Series)
The conclusions support WHO Director-General Margaret Chan’s assertion (see Profile) that “universal coverage is the single most powerful concept that public health has to offer”.
The Lancet (The Lancet: Universal Health Coverage: Global Health Series)
According to a World Report in this issue, more than 60 million people in India were forced below the poverty line by health-care costs in 2011.
The Lancet (The Lancet: Universal Health Coverage: Global Health Series)
Regardless of the euphemism chosen to describe shared payments, they are in reality a locked gate that prevents access to health care for many who need it most. They should be scrapped.
The Lancet (The Lancet: Universal Health Coverage: Global Health Series)
In addition to political will, UHC requires sufficient numbers of well-trained and motivated staff with adequate resources for prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and professional development, and—to thrive—a culture of good governance and aspirational attitudes.
The Lancet (The Lancet: Universal Health Coverage: Global Health Series)
Health,1 emphasised this idea of health as an investment rather than an expenditure. The 2001 report of the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health2 took this idea further, showing that a 10% improvement in life expectancy at birth is associated with annual economic growth increases of 0·3–0·4%.
The Lancet (The Lancet: Universal Health Coverage: Global Health Series)
Today 60% of workers in the private sector receive their insurance through their employer. I believe that by 2025 fewer than 20% of workers at private companies will continue to receive their health insurance through an employer-sponsored program. Nevertheless many will still receive an employer contribution, a so-called defined contribution toward the purchase of health insurance in the exchange. I believe the majority of private-sector workers will get their coverage through the exchanges.
Ezekiel J. Emanuel (Reinventing American Health Care: How the Affordable Care Act will Improve our Terribly Complex, Blatantly Unjust, Outrageously Expensive, Grossly Inefficient, Error Prone System)
the U.S. is on the precipice of a permanent shift that threatens to transform the country from a thriving, diverse community of religious believers who share a marketplace and a public square into a collection of separate mini-theocracies, where we are more concerned about the religion of the person sitting next to us than the fact that he or she is a fellow American, where an employee needs to know the religion of a Fortune 500 company's owners to know what the health coverage will be, and where goods are tagged with religious identity.
Marci A. Hamilton (God vs. the Gavel: The Perils of Extreme Religious Liberty)
From a strategic perspective, however, the issues in health care can be divided into three broad areas. The first is the cost of and access to health insurance. The second is standards for coverage, or the types of care that should be covered by insurance versus being the responsibility of the individual. The third is the structure of health care delivery itself.
Michael E. Porter (Redefining Health Care: Creating Value-Based Competition on Results)
As he travels the country, he has hardened his positions, delighting the base of his party but moving farther from the positions of most Americans on most issues. He denies the existence of man-made climate change, opposes comprehensive immigration reform, rejects marriage equality, and, of course, demands the repeal of “every blessed word of Obamacare.” (Cruz gets his own health-care coverage from Goldman Sachs, where his wife is a vice-president.)
Anonymous
Global Insurance Travel Medical Coverage GeoBlueAffiliate Available for PrestigeCare Private Health Advisory Members GeoBlue Voyager Global Insurance for Single-Trip International Travel travel insurance Global insurance health coverage may be the last thought we have when planning a trip to another country. Most people do not even realize that while traveling, your current medical insurance can be useless in some countries or that your usual over-the-counter medications are prohibited in many locations. Protect Your Health Around the World. What is GeoBlue VoyagerSM? Short-term travel medical insurance for U.S. residents traveling abroad. Why Choose GeoBlue? Strength of a U.S. Insurer Underwritten by 4 Ever Life Insurance Company, rated A- (Excellent) by A.M. Best. 4 Ever Life is an independent licensee of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association. Better Coverage: Our plans are U.S. licensed and feature coverage more generous than plans sold as “surplus coverage.” Our plans do not restrict illnesses or injuries resulting from a terrorist act. We do not impose precertification penalties for hospitalization. We provide coverage for pre-existing conditions for medical evacuation. Pre-existing conditions are also covered in all instances by our Choice plan. A Better Kind of Care: International travelers can leave home feeling confident that a trusted source of care is available at a moment’s notice - no matter what town, country or time zone, with global insurance. Travel anywhere knowing that if your health is a concern, getting good care is not. Global insurance coverage is available through PrestigeCare Private Health Advisory's affiliate partner, GeoBlue. You will have access to short-term global insurance health coverage options that best suit your needs while traveling. Just another way PrestigeCare Private Health Advisory looks out for all your health and wellness needs.* At PrestigeCare, we provide health solution services. *Up to $250,000 of coverage available through our affiliated partner for an unlimited number of trips of a maximum of 30 days in duration.
maranderson111
Global Insurance Travel Medical Coverage GeoBlueAffiliate Available for PrestigeCare Private Health Advisory Members GeoBlue Voyager Global Insurance for Single-Trip International Travel travel insurance Global insurance health coverage may be the last thought we have when planning a trip to another country. Most people do not even realize that while traveling, your current medical insurance can be useless in some countries or that your usual over-the-counter medications are prohibited in many locations. Protect Your Health Around the World. What is GeoBlue VoyagerSM? Short-term travel medical insurance for U.S. residents traveling abroad. Why Choose GeoBlue? Strength of a U.S. Insurer Underwritten by 4 Ever Life Insurance Company, rated A- (Excellent) by A.M. Best. 4 Ever Life is an independent licensee of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association. Better Coverage: Our plans are U.S. licensed and feature coverage more generous than plans sold as “surplus coverage.” Our plans do not restrict illnesses or injuries resulting from a terrorist act. We do not impose precertification penalties for hospitalization. We provide coverage for pre-existing conditions for medical evacuation. Pre-existing conditions are also covered in all instances by our Choice plan. A Better Kind of Care: International travelers can leave home feeling confident that a trusted source of care is available at a moment’s notice - no matter what town, country or time zone, with global insurance. Travel anywhere knowing that if your health is a concern, getting good care is not. Global insurance coverage is available through PrestigeCare Private Health Advisory's affiliate partner, GeoBlue. You will have access to short-term global insurance health coverage options that best suit your needs while traveling. Just another way PrestigeCare Private Health Advisory looks out for all your health and wellness needs.* At PrestigeCare, we provide health solution services. *Up to $250,000 of coverage available through our affiliated partner for an unlimited number of trips of a maximum of 30 days in duration.
markanderson111
The Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to delay for one year the tax penalty Americans will pay under President Barack Obama's healthcare law if they decline to enroll in health coverage.
Anonymous
The shortcomings of our system can be grouped into three basic problems: coverage, quality, and cost.
T.R. Reid (The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care)
There are people who are alive today because of the health coverage he made possible. There are soldiers home with their families instead of halfway across the world. There are hundreds of thousands of autoworkers on the assembly line who would have been idled but for him, and the overall economy is in better shape than it has been in years. There are folks who are getting improved deals from their banks and mortgage lenders thanks to new rules in place and a new cop on the beat. There are gay and lesbian Americans who are, for the first time, free to defend their country without having to lie about who they are. There are women who have greater legal recourse when they’re paid less than the man doing the exact same job alongside them. There are families who can afford to send their kids to college because there is more aid available.
David Axelrod (Believer: My Forty Years in Politics)
Less than 30 essential medicines are available in India’s public hospitals and often they are out of stock.
The Lancet (The Lancet: Universal Health Coverage: Global Health Series)
mentioned the network’s coverage of fracking, a process to extract oil and gas that has helped the United States become the world’s leading oil producer. Russia, another major oil producer, sees this development as a threat, and RT offers a constant stream of stories on the health dangers of fracking.
Anonymous
The U.S. is the only developed country that does not guarantee health coverage for all of its citizens.
Steven Brill (America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System)
Luntz used polls, focus groups, and “instant response dial sessions” to perfect the language of health-care attacks and then tested the lines on average Americans in St. Louis, Missouri. Out of these sessions, Luntz compiled a seminal twenty-eight-page confidential memo in April warning that there was no groundswell of public opposition to Obama’s health-care plan at that point; in fact, there was a groundswell of public support. By far the most effective approach to turning the public against the program, Luntz advised, was to label it a “government takeover.” He wrote, “Takeovers are like coups. They both lead to dictators and a loss of freedom.” “I did create the phrase ‘government takeover’ of health care. And I believe it,” Luntz maintained, noting too that “it gave the Republicans the weapon they needed to defeat Obama in 2010.” But most experts found the pitch patently misleading because the Obama administration was proposing that Americans buy private health insurance from for-profit companies, not the government. In fact, progressives were incensed that rather than backing a “public option” for those who preferred a government insurance program, the Obama plan included a government mandate that individuals purchase health-care coverage, a conservative idea hatched by the Heritage Foundation to stave off nationalized health care. Luntz’s phrase was so false that it was chosen as “the Lie of the Year” by the nonpartisan fact-checking group PolitiFact. Yet while a rear guard of administration officials tried lamely to correct the record, Luntz’s deceptive message stuck, agitating increasingly fearful and angry voters, many of whom flocked to Tea Party protests.
Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
Will universal health coverage lead the country (USA) down the slippery path to the dreaded European-style socialism?
James Peoples (Humanity: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology)
We need real health care reform. But it should expand competition and empower patients, and disempower government bureaucrats from getting between us and our doctors. We should allow people to purchase insurance across state lines (which is currently illegal), which will in turn create a fifty-state national marketplace for low-cost catastrophic coverage. If you want more coverage, you want more choices and lower costs. Obamacare gives us fewer choices and higher costs.
Ted Cruz (A Time for Truth: Reigniting the Promise of America)
The state also spurned the expanded Medicaid coverage for the needy that it was eligible for at no cost under the Affordable Care Act. This show of defiance denied free health care to 500,000 uninsured low-income residents. A study by health experts at Harvard and the City University of New York projected that the legislature’s obstruction of these benefits would cost residents between 455 and 1,145 lives a year.
Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
She had moved to Los Angeles from the Midwest, lured by a job with a publisher. But the publisher was bought by another soon after, and she was left without a job. Turning to freelance writing, an erratic marketplace, she found herself either swamped with work or unable to pay her rent. She often had to ration phone calls, and for the first time was without health insurance. This lack of coverage was particularly distressing: she found herself catastrophizing about her health, sure every headache signaled a brain tumor, picturing herself in an accident whenever she had to drive somewhere. She often found herself lost in a long reverie of worry, a medley of distress. But, she said, she found her worries almost addictive. Borkovec
Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence)
A small business owner from Port Clinton, OH, wrote, on September 19, 2013:   I strongly urge you to stand up for the middle class and small business and vote to DEFUND ObamaCare. As a small business owner, we have always offered health insurance. After meeting with our health insurance representative, we learned that the lowest coverage level of ObamaCare offered is estimated to be about $400 a person, twice what we pay now for excellent coverage. . . .  With big business and government being exempted from this policy, again the SMALL BUSINESS OWNER and individual are left with all the costs for everyone else. This could well end up closing our business and then there will be 15 more individuals collecting from the government.   A
Ted Cruz (TED CRUZ: FOR GOD AND COUNTRY: Ted Cruz on ISIS, ISIL, Terrorism, Immigration, Obamacare, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Republicans,)
I deeply admire the president’s determination to defy the small, poll-driven politics of our day to tackle big things. However, the gap between the singular focus of the campaign and his varied and ambitious agenda afterward undoubtedly sapped some of his political strength, leaving Americans wondering if he was truly focused on their concerns. You can’t take politics entirely out of the process. I don’t speak with the president as much anymore. With the campaigns over, our once-frequent conversations have slowed to a trickle. I miss them. And when I hear the thundering hooves of the Washington pundits and pols on a stampede to run him down, I feel for him. Hell, I bleed for him. The brutal midterm election of 2014 was another painful rebuke. Yet I know this: There are people who are alive today because of the health coverage he made possible. There are soldiers home with their families instead of halfway across the world. There are hundreds of thousands of autoworkers on the assembly line who would have been idled but for him, and the overall economy is in better shape than it has been in years. There are folks who are getting improved deals from their banks and mortgage lenders thanks to new rules in place and a new cop on the beat. There are gay and lesbian Americans who are, for the first time, free to defend their country without having to lie about who they are. There are women who have greater legal recourse when they’re paid less than the man doing the exact same job alongside them. There are families who can afford to send their kids to college because there is more aid available. Oh, and yes . . . just as he predicted in my conference room back in those wonderful, heady days when we first considered an audacious run for the presidency, millions of kids in our country today can dream bigger dreams because Barack Obama has blazed the trail for them.
David Axelrod (Believer: My Forty Years in Politics)
For example, after a half-century of Johnson’s “Great Society” welfare programs, which have cost trillions of dollars, the national poverty rate remains roughly the same as it was in the 1960s.55 And despite countless promises by President Obama that his policies would make health coverage and college more affordable,56 health insurance costs and college expenses57 are significantly higher than they were when Obama implemented his reforms.
Glenn Beck (Arguing with Socialists)
Despite its immense effect on the global civilization, Spanish flu started to fade quickly from the public and scientific attention, establishing a precedent for the future pandemics, and leading some historians (Crosby) to call it the “forgotten pandemic”. One of the explanations for this treatment of the pandemic may lie in the fact that it peaked rapidly, over a period of 9 months before it even could get adequate media coverage. Another reason may be in the fact that the pandemic was overshadowed by more significant historical events, such as the culmination and the ending of World War I. A third explanation may be that this is how societies deal with such rapidly spreading pandemics – at first with great interest, horror, and panic, and then, as soon as they start to subside, with dispassionate disinterest.
Damir Huremović (Psychiatry of Pandemics: A Mental Health Response to Infection Outbreak)
Even those too lazy to vote feel it their birthright to blast our elected representatives from every direction. We complain bitterly when we do not get all we want as if it were possible to have more services with lower taxes, broader health care coverage with no federal involvement, a cleaner environment without regulations, security from terrorists with no infringement on privacy, and cheaper consumer goods made locally by workers with higher wages. In short, we crave all the benefits of change without the costs. When we are disappointed, our response is to retreat into cynicism, then start thinking about whether there might be a quicker, easier, and less democratic way to satisfy our wants.
Madeleine K. Albright (Fascism: A Warning)
The Christian right’s religious freedom agenda isn’t just about holiday greetings and clergy endorsement of candidates. Most urgently in 2016, the leaders who met with Trump that day had spent the past eight years fighting some of the signature achievements of Barack Obama’s presidency: the passage of the Affordable Care Act, particularly its regulation requiring that employer-sponsored health care plans include full coverage for contraception, and the rapid and historic expansion of LGBTQ rights.
Sarah Posner (Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind)
From the start, Obama’s adversaries on the religious right—from officials of the Catholic Church to leaders of antichoice organizations to evangelical celebrities—portrayed Obamacare as a socialist takeover that would force taxpayers to pay for coverage of abortion services. That was not true, but it proved a potent talking point, priming the base for outrage when the Obama administration, in early 2012, finalized a regulation under the act requiring employer-sponsored health plans to cover contraception without a copay. Even after the Obama administration exempted houses of worship from the requirement and offered religious nonprofits an “accommodation” that permitted them to opt out by signing a form that would put the onus of coverage on their insurers, the regulation triggered a series of overheated, Republican-led congressional hearings, activist protests, and years of protracted litigation.
Sarah Posner (Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind)
Other countries over the decades expanded health-care coverage, adopted family-leave policies, extended mass transit and implemented child allowances to reduce poverty, while the United States bucked the trend by slashing taxes, cutting back hours at public libraries, raising tuition at state universities and allowing infrastructure to decay.
Nicholas D. Kristof (Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope)
Bring it on, Tron! I dare you. Try to take away my freedom of expression. I’m a journalist. A free-speech warrior. I serve in the Army of the First Amendment. I didn’t take this job for the bad money and the regressive health care coverage. I’m here for the truth, the sunshine, the casting open of closed doors! <
Rainbow Rowell (Attachments)
Behind every cup of Starbucks is the world's highest-quality, ethically sourced coffee beans; baristas with health-care coverage and stock in the company; farmers who are treated fairly and humanely; a mission to treat all people with respect and dignity; and passionate coffee experts whose knowledge about coffee cannot be matched by any other coffee company.
Howard Schultz (Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul)
DISPARITIES AND HIGH COSTS FUEL THE HEALTH CARE CRISIS America’s health crisis is really three crises rolled into one. The first is public health: America’s average life expectancy is now several years below that of many other countries, and for some parts of the population, life expectancy is falling. The second is health inequality: The gaps in public health according to race and class are shockingly large. The third is health care cost: America’s health care is by far the costliest in the world. The Sustainable Development Goals put good health for all in a central place in sustainable development, notably in SDG 3. This goal calls for massive reductions of the burdens of both communicable and noncommunicable diseases. SDG 3 (Target 3.8) also emphasizes the need for universal and equitable access to quality health care, in order to “achieve universal health coverage, including financial risk protection, access to quality essential health-care services and access to safe, effective, quality and affordable essential medicines
Jeffrey D. Sachs (Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, & Sustainable)
DISPARITIES AND HIGH COSTS FUEL THE HEALTH CARE CRISIS America’s health crisis is really three crises rolled into one. The first is public health: America’s average life expectancy is now several years below that of many other countries, and for some parts of the population, life expectancy is falling. The second is health inequality: The gaps in public health according to race and class are shockingly large. The third is health care cost: America’s health care is by far the costliest in the world. The Sustainable Development Goals put good health for all in a central place in sustainable development, notably in SDG 3. This goal calls for massive reductions of the burdens of both communicable and noncommunicable diseases. SDG 3 (Target 3.8) also emphasizes the need for universal and equitable access to quality health care, in order to “achieve universal health coverage, including financial risk protection, access to quality essential health-care services and access to safe, effective, quality and affordable essential medicines and vaccines for all.
Jeffrey D. Sachs (Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, & Sustainable)
and Medicaid, which would help expand coverage and bring down costs. The other thing we should be honest about is how hard it’s going to be, no matter what we do, to create significant economic opportunity in every remote area of our vast nation. In some places, the old jobs aren’t coming back, and the infrastructure and workforce needed to support big new industries aren’t there. As hard as it is, people may have to leave their hometowns and look for work elsewhere in America. We know this can have a transformative effect. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration experimented with a program called Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing, which gave poor families in public housing vouchers to move to safer, middle-income neighborhoods where their children were surrounded every day by evidence that life can be better. Twenty years later, the children of those families have grown up to earn higher incomes and attend college at higher rates than their peers who stayed behind. And the younger the kids were when they moved, the bigger boost they received. Previous generations of Americans actually moved around the country much more than we do today. Millions of black families migrated from the rural South to the urban North. Large numbers of poor whites left Appalachia to take jobs in Midwestern factories. My own father hopped a freight train from Scranton, Pennsylvania, to Chicago in 1935, looking for work. Yet today, despite all our advances, fewer Americans are moving than ever before. One of the laid-off steelworkers I met in Kentucky told me he found a good job in Columbus, Ohio, but he was doing the 120-mile commute every week because he didn’t want to move. “People from Kentucky, they want to be in Kentucky,” another said to me. “That’s something that’s just in our DNA.” I understand that feeling. People’s identities and their support systems—extended family, friends, church congregations, and so on—are rooted in where they come from. This is painful, gut-wrenching stuff. And no politician wants to be the one to say it. I believe that after we do everything we can to help create new jobs in distressed small towns and rural areas, we also have to give people the skills and tools they need to seek opportunities beyond their hometowns—and provide a strong safety net both for those who leave and those who stay. Whether it’s updating policies to meet the changing conditions of America’s workers, or encouraging greater mobility, the bottom line is the same: we can’t spend all our time staving off decline. We need to create new opportunities, not just slow down the loss of old ones. Rather than keep trying to re-create the economy of the past, we should focus on making the jobs people actually have better and figure out how to create the good jobs of the future in fields such as clean energy, health care, construction, computer coding, and advanced manufacturing. Republicans will always be better at defending yesterday. Democrats have to be in the future business. The good news is we have
Hillary Rodham Clinton (What Happened)
According again to Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, discussion of public policy accounted for just 10 percent of all campaign news coverage in the general election. Nearly all the rest was taken up by obsessive coverage of controversies such as email. Health care, taxes, trade, immigration, national security—all of it crammed into just 10 percent of the press coverage. The Shorenstein Center found that not a single one of my many detailed policy plans received more than a blip of press coverage. “If she had a policy agenda, it was not apparent in the news,” it concluded. “Her lengthy record of public service also received scant attention.” None of Trump’s scandals, from scamming students at Trump University, to stiffing small businesses in Atlantic City, to exploiting his foundation, to refusing to release his taxes as every presidential candidate since 1976 has done—and on and on—generated the kind of sustained, campaign-defining coverage that my emails did.
Hillary Rodham Clinton (What Happened)
Medicare, the federal health care program that currently provides benefits to more than 55 million aged and disabled people, has never included coverage for routine dental care.
Mary Otto (Teeth)
Consider a simple comparison: The American government spends more on Americans’ health care (per capita) than the French government spends on their entire health care system (again in per capita terms). It is a fair criticism that some individuals are left out of this coverage, or perhaps too much is sent to doctors and hospitals, but using some very plausible metrics, the American government is more involved in health care than is the French government.
Tyler Cowen (The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream)
Sadly, though, millions of people watched. And in my view, the “Commander in Chief Forum” was representative of how many in the press covered the campaign as a whole. According again to Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, discussion of public policy accounted for just 10 percent of all campaign news coverage in the general election. Nearly all the rest was taken up by obsessive coverage of controversies such as email. Health care, taxes, trade, immigration, national security—all of it crammed into just 10 percent of the press coverage. The Shorenstein Center found that not a single one of my many detailed policy plans received more than a blip of press coverage. “If she had a policy agenda, it was not apparent in the news,” it concluded. “Her lengthy record of public service also received scant attention.” None of Trump’s scandals, from scamming students at Trump University, to stiffing small businesses in Atlantic City, to exploiting his foundation, to refusing to release his taxes as every presidential candidate since 1976 has done—and on and on—generated the kind of sustained, campaign-defining coverage that my emails did. The decline of serious reporting on policy has been going on for a while, but it got much worse in 2016. In 2008, the major networks’ nightly newscasts spent a total of 220 minutes on policy. In 2012, it was 114 minutes. In 2016, it was just 32 minutes. (That stat is from two weeks before the election, but it didn’t change much in the final stretch.) By contrast, 100 minutes were spent covering my emails. In other words, the political press was telling voters that my emails were three times more important than all the other issues combined.
Hillary Rodham Clinton (What Happened)
Netherlands, which has a restrictive immigration policy compared to the United States. Most European nations, including the Netherlands, after all, have universal health insurance coverage, which makes drug treatment and psychiatric treatment more available, and the Dutch government subsidizes more housing. Finally, the Netherlands’ big success was with heroin, which has effective pharmacological substitutes, methadone and Suboxone, not with meth, which lacks anything similar. But there may be fewer obstacles than appear. The Netherlands has a private health-care insurance system similar to that of the United States and covered the people who needed health care in ways similar to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, which significantly expanded access to drug treatment, including medically assisted treatment, in the United States.4 San Francisco subsidizes a significant quantity of housing, as we have seen. While California is larger than the Netherlands, the population of Amsterdam (872,000) is nearly identical to San Francisco’s (882,000).5 And while California’s population and geographic area are larger and more difficult to manage than those of the Netherlands, California also has significantly greater wealth and resources, constituting in 2019 the fifth-largest economy in the world.6 And the approach to breaking up open drug scenes, treating addiction, and providing psychiatric care is fundamentally the same whether in five European cities, Philadelphia, New York, or Phoenix.
Michael Shellenberger (San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities)
Because the NHS budget covers everybody, the money saved on one patient can be used to treat another. Declining to operate on a sick grandmother means there is more money available to treat sick children. Accordingly, protests about denied coverage tend to be muted. In the U.S. system, that trade-off doesn’t apply; if an American insurance company refuses to pay $36,000 for Herceptin for one of its clients, the money saved is likely used to enhance profits.
T.R. Reid (The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care)
What American Healthcare Can Learn from Italy: Three Lessons It’s easy. First, learn to live like Italians. Eat their famous Mediterranean diet, drink alcohol regularly but in moderation, use feet instead of cars, stop packing pistols and dropping drugs. Second, flatten out the class structure. Shrink the gap between high and low incomes, raise pensions and minimum wages to subsistence level, fix the tax structure to favor the ninety-nine percent. And why not redistribute lifestyle too? Give working stiffs the same freedom to have kids (maternity leave), convalesce (sick leave), and relax (proper vacations) as the rich. Finally, give everybody access to health care. Not just insurance, but actual doctors, medications, and hospitals. As I write, the future of the Affordable Care Act is uncertain, but surely the country will not fall into the abyss that came before. Once they’ve had a taste of what it’s like not to be one heart attack away from bankruptcy, Americans won’t turn back the clock. Even what is lately being called Medicare for All, considered to be on the fringe left a decade ago and slammed as “socialized medicine,” is now supported by a majority of Americans, according to some polls. In practice, there’s little hope for Italian lessons one and two—the United States is making only baby steps toward improving its lifestyle, and its income inequality is worse every year. But the third lesson is more feasible. Like Italy, we can provide universal access to treatment and medications with minimal point-of-service payments and with prices kept down by government negotiation. Financial arrangements could be single-payer like Medicare or use private insurance companies as intermediaries like Switzerland, without copying the full Italian model of doctors on government salaries. Despite the death by a thousand cuts currently being inflicted on the Affordable Care Act, I am convinced that Americans will no longer stand for leaving vast numbers of the population uninsured, or denying medical coverage to people whose only sin is to be sick. The health care genie can’t be put back in the bottle.
Susan Levenstein (Dottoressa: An American Doctor in Rome)
To be clear, the beneficiaries of Truman’s universal coverage would have been overwhelmingly white, as white people at the time made up 90 percent of the U.S. population. Few Americans, Black or white, had private insurance plans, and the recent notion that employers would provide it had yet to solidify into a nationwide expectation. The pool of national health insurance would have been mainly for white Americans, but the threat of sharing it with even a small number of Black and brown Americans helped to doom the entire plan from the start.
Heather McGhee (The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together)
Even those too lazy to vote feel it their birthright to blast our elected representatives from every direction. We complain bitterly when we do not get all we want as if it were possible to have more services with lower taxes, broader health care coverage with no federal involvement, a cleaner environment without regulations, security from terrorists with no infringement on privacy, and cheaper consumer goods made locally by workers with higher wages. In short, we crave all the benefits of change without the costs. When we are disappointed, our response is to retreat into cynicism, then start thinking about whether there might be a quicker, easier, and less democratic way to satisfy our wants.
Madeleine K. Albright (Fascism: A Warning)
Phase one, the “trickle-down paradigm,” lasted from about January 1981 to November 1985. It approached cocaine as a glamour drug that, through the rise of crack, threatened middle-class Americans. At this phase, the media emphasized the importance of public-health interventions. Between December 1985 and November 1986, coverage shifted to phase two, a “siege paradigm,” which reframed the crack epidemic as a crisis originating in the “inner city.” This phase of coverage racialized the substance and emphasized a law-enforcement response. Finally, after much criticism that the media was hyping the crack epidemic and engaging in harmful stereotyping, coverage shifted to a “post-crisis” phase, which returned to public-health solutions but maintained its focus on the inner city, continuing the racialization. Television
Donovan X. Ramsey (When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era)
suffering in working-class America was not inevitable but rather reflects decades of social-policy mistakes and often gratuitous cruelty: the war on drugs that led to mass incarceration, indifference to the loss of blue-collar jobs, insufficient health-care coverage, embrace of a highly unequal education system, tax giveaways to tycoons, zillionaire-friendly court decisions, acceptance of growing inequality, and systematic underinvestment in children and community services such as drug treatment.
Nicholas D. Kristof (Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope)
If the trend keeps up, you can imagine the never marrieds demanding three-month paid sabbaticals every five years and maybe a bonus for the reduced health care expenses of one person instead of coverage afforded to families
Mark Penn (Microtrends Squared: The New Small Forces Driving Today's Big Disruptions)
it is from such diverse sources with varied networks and linkages that the response to HIV / AIDS has been patched together. it is an NGO model of response, uneven in coverage and quality, responsive to the particularities of local circumstance, the character of local leaders, and the availability and types of funds available.
Alex de Waal (AIDS and Power: Why There Is No Political Crisis – Yet (African Arguments))
When analyzing the cost of U.S. health care, it’s important to remember that spending is not spread evenly among all patients. According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, in 2009, 21.8% of health care spending came from just 1% of patients. That’s roughly three million people in the U.S. who each spent about $90,000 in a year on health-related expenses. Further, the AHRQ states, “[T]he top decile of spenders were more likely to be in fair or poor health, elderly, female, non-Hispanic whites and those with public-only coverage. Those who remained in the bottom half of spenders were more likely to be in excellent health, children and young adults, men, Hispanics, and the uninsured.”44 The fact that so many resources go to so few patients led to the term “super-utilizers.” Increasingly, policy efforts focus on how to reduce costs among this group.
Elisabeth Askin (The Health Care Handbook: A Clear and Concise Guide to the United States Health Care System, 2nd Edition)
We are already seeing car insurance premiums linked to tracking devices in cars, and health insurance coverage that depends on people wearing a fitness tracking device. When surveillance is used to determine things that hold sway over important aspects of life, such as insurance coverage or employment, it starts to appear less benign. Moreover, data analysis can reveal surprisingly intrusive things: for example, the movement sensor in a smartwatch or fitness tracker can be used to work out what you are typing (for example, passwords) with fairly good accuracy [98]. And algorithms for analysis are only going to get better.
Martin Kleppmann (Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems)
The neighbors in Mount Airy were not so different from working-class people across America. Politically disconnected and angry at those they perceived to be bilking the government, they were turning on each other rather than placing the blame on the exploitative pharmaceutical companies that seeded the epidemic and the power-hungry politicians who rolled out the red carpet for them while doing virtually nothing about growing inequality, poor health care coverage, and declining wages that affected everyone, whether they used drugs or not.
Beth Macy (Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America's Overdose Crisis)
What are your feelings from Bush to Obama? Besides being responsible for the death of half a million people, I feel like Bush dealt a huge economic and social blow to the USA, one from which we may never fully recover. He directly flushed 3 trillion dollars down the toilet on hopeless, pointlessly destructive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq …and they’re not even over! For years to come, we’ll be paying costs for all the injured veterans (over 50,000) and destabilizing three countries, because you have to look at the impact that the Afghan war has on Pakistan. Bush expanded the use of torture, and created a whole new layer of government bureaucracy (the “Department of Homeland Security”) to spy on Americans. He created Indefinite Detention (at Guantanamo and other US military bases) and expanded the use of executive-ordered assassinations using the new drone technology. On economic issues, his administration allowed corporations to run things and regulate themselves. The agency that was supposed to regulate oil drilling had lobbyist-paid prostitutes sleeping with employees while oil industry lobbyists basically ran the agency. Energy companies like Enron, and the country’s investment banks were deregulated at the end of the Clinton administration and Bush allowed them to run wild. Above all, he was incompetent and appointed some really stupid people to important positions at every level of government. Certainly, Obama has been involved in many of these same activities. A few he’s increased, such as the use of drone assassinations, but most of them he has at least tried to scale back. At the beginning of his first term, he tried to close the Guantanamo prison and have trials for many of the detainees in the United States but conservatives (including many Democrats) stirred up public resistance and blocked this from happening. He tried to get some kind of universal healthcare because over 50 million Americans don’t have health insurance. This is one of the leading causes of personal bankruptcies and foreclosures because someone gets sick in a family, loses their job, loses their health insurance (because American employers are source of most people’s healthcare) and they can’t pay their health bills or their mortgage. Or they use up all their money caring for a sick family member. So many people in the US wanted health insurance reform or single-payer, universal health care similar to what you have in the UK. Members of Obama’s own party (The Democrats) joined with Republicans to narrowly block “The public option” but they managed to pass a half-assed but not-unsubstantial reform of health insurance that would prevent insurers from denying you coverage when you’re sick or have a “preexisting condition.” The minute it was signed into law, Republicans sued in the courts (all the way to the supreme court) and fought, tooth and nail to block its implementation. Same thing with gun control, even as we’re one of the most violent industrial countries in the world. (Among industrial countries, our murder rate is second only to Russia). Obama has managed to withdraw troops from Iraq and Afghanistan over Republican opposition but, literally, everything he tries to do, they blast it in the media and fight it in Congress. So, while I have a lot of criticisms of Obama, he is many orders of magnitude less awful than Bush and many of the positive things he’s tried to do have been blocked. That said, the Democratic and Republican parties agree on more things than they disagree. Both signed off on the Afghan and Iraq wars. Both signed off on deregulation of banks, of derivatives, of mortgage regulations and of the energy and telecom business …and we’ve been living with the consequences ever since. I’m guessing it’s the same thing with Labor and Conservatives in the UK. Labor or Democrats will SAY they stand for certain “progressive” things but they end up supporting the same old crap... (2014 interview with iamhiphop)
Andy Singer
the head of innovation of an international French insurance company. I was supporting a HealthTech start-up providing remote chats with GPs in South Asian emerging countries. As data is the new oil, the start-up was also capturing analytics in the process on key trends for main pathologies. Patients in those countries miss affordable access to medical consultations. Equally, insurance companies miss useful data of the healthcare market and the patient requirements. People in this part of the world cannot pay for yearly insurances with large coverage but they could afford some level of insurance addressing specific diseases, pregnancy or partial coverage for their children. Hence insurance companies are keen to better understand this population and tap into a huge market. As the win/win was obvious the founder of the start-up had engaged with several insurance companies in view of developing an open innovation program. I was following up the engagement bringing the professional experience of working with a major healthcare innovative company in the US. The conversation started very well with an innovation manager genuinely supportive of integrating start-up creativity in the enterprise. Knowing the corporate world, I was not surprised to uncover two obstacles:
Veronique Germaine Boudaud (Think Digital Ecosystems!: 9 Questions To Build The Future Of Your Business)
We pay more individually and as a nation for healthcare and have worse health outcomes than our industrialized peers, all of whom have some version of publicly financed universal coverage.
Heather McGhee (The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together)
We can turn off the twenty-four-hour coverage and take a walk and a deep breath and return home to wrap our arms around our kids, pets, lovers, or friends.
Sarah Hays Coomer (Physical Disobedience: An Unruly Guide to Health and Stamina for the Modern Feminist)
 We can turn off the twenty-four-hour coverage and take a walk and a deep breath and return home to wrap our arms around our kids, pets, lovers, or friends.
Sarah Hays Coomer (Physical Disobedience: An Unruly Guide to Health and Stamina for the Modern Feminist)
working at reduced pay, with marginal perks and nonexistent health coverage.
Philip Dray (There is Power in a Union)
Certainly there is no limit to taxation if the benefits derived from public services by society measure up to the cost in taxation.”2 As cited in the quotation at the beginning of this chapter, Obama Sr. is even willing to consider tax rates up to 100 percent! It’s remarkable that this paper by Obama Sr. has gotten so little media coverage. One would expect it to be on the front page of every newspaper and a lead item on the evening news, especially during public debates in America over taxes and massive government intervention in the health care and financial sectors. Notice the two-part economic strategy proposed by Obama Sr.: forced state control over private enterprise, and confiscatory tax rates with no upper limit. We will find it instructive to compare this to President Obama’s economic policies. For example, President Obama frequently talks about people being forced to pay their “fair share” in taxes, but he never specifies what that share is. Here, we have a document that explicitly states his father’s thoughts on the subject and may provide some guidance to the son’s own thinking. Yet for many in the media, these father-son comparisons are completely taboo. For them, it seems, the ghost of Barack Obama Sr. must be quietly ignored, so it cannot be seen haunting the corridors of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Dinesh D'Souza (Obama's America: Unmaking the American Dream)
Beyond One-Way ANOVA The approach described in the preceding section is called one-way ANOVA. This scenario is easily generalized to accommodate more than one independent variable. These independent variables are either discrete (called factors) or continuous (called covariates). These approaches are called n-way ANOVA or ANCOVA (the “C” indicates the presence of covariates). Two way ANOVA, for example, allows for testing of the effect of two different independent variables on the dependent variable, as well as the interaction of these two independent variables. An interaction effect between two variables describes the way that variables “work together” to have an effect on the dependent variable. This is perhaps best illustrated by an example. Suppose that an analyst wants to know whether the number of health care information workshops attended, as well as a person’s education, are associated with healthy lifestyle behaviors. Although we can surely theorize how attending health care information workshops and a person’s education can each affect an individual’s healthy lifestyle behaviors, it is also easy to see that the level of education can affect a person’s propensity for attending health care information workshops, as well. Hence, an interaction effect could also exist between these two independent variables (factors). The effects of each independent variable on the dependent variable are called main effects (as distinct from interaction effects). To continue the earlier example, suppose that in addition to population, an analyst also wants to consider a measure of the watershed’s preexisting condition, such as the number of plant and animal species at risk in the watershed. Two-way ANOVA produces the results shown in Table 13.4, using the transformed variable mentioned earlier. The first row, labeled “model,” refers to the combined effects of all main and interaction effects in the model on the dependent variable. This is the global F-test. The “model” row shows that the two main effects and the single interaction effect, when considered together, are significantly associated with changes in the dependent variable (p < .000). However, the results also show a reduced significance level of “population” (now, p = .064), which seems related to the interaction effect (p = .076). Although neither effect is significant at conventional levels, the results do suggest that an interaction effect is present between population and watershed condition (of which the number of at-risk species is an indicator) on watershed wetland loss. Post-hoc tests are only provided separately for each of the independent variables (factors), and the results show the same homogeneous grouping for both of the independent variables. Table 13.4 Two-Way ANOVA Results As we noted earlier, ANOVA is a family of statistical techniques that allow for a broad range of rather complex experimental designs. Complete coverage of these techniques is well beyond the scope of this book, but in general, many of these techniques aim to discern the effect of variables in the presence of other (control) variables. ANOVA is but one approach for addressing control variables. A far more common approach in public policy, economics, political science, and public administration (as well as in many others fields) is multiple regression (see Chapter 15). Many analysts feel that ANOVA and regression are largely equivalent. Historically, the preference for ANOVA stems from its uses in medical and agricultural research, with applications in education and psychology. Finally, the ANOVA approach can be generalized to allow for testing on two or more dependent variables. This approach is called multiple analysis of variance, or MANOVA. Regression-based analysis can also be used for dealing with multiple dependent variables, as mentioned in Chapter 17.
Evan M. Berman (Essential Statistics for Public Managers and Policy Analysts)
Obamacare’s first years have been fraught with failure, but its future looks even more bleak. Big premium increases are coming this year and next for people who purchased health insurance on the Obamacare exchanges. Millions of others with coverage outside the exchanges lost their previous policies and now are facing double-digit premium hikes. Many Americans say the new policies they are forced to buy don’t meet their needs—with excessive benefit requirements and impossibly high deductibles. Congress is continuing to try to evade the law and exempt itself from key provisions, and your privacy is still at risk. We at Judicial Watch will continue to hold the government to account over this unfair and unworkable health care law and pressure the new president and Congress elected in 2016 to come clean and level with the American people on its deficiencies.
Tom Fitton (Clean House: Exposing Our Government's Secrets and Lies)
In fact, progressives were incensed that rather than backing a “public option” for those who preferred a government insurance program, the Obama plan included a government mandate that individuals purchase health-care coverage, a conservative idea hatched by the Heritage Foundation to stave off nationalized health care.
Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
the case of Nelene Fox. Fox was from Temecula, California, and was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer in 1991, when she was thirty-eight years old. Surgery and conventional chemotherapy failed, and the cancer spread to her bone marrow. The disease was terminal. Doctors at the University of Southern California offered her a radical but seemingly promising new treatment—high-dose chemotherapy with bone marrow transplantation. To Fox, it was her one chance of cure. Her insurer, Health Net, denied her request for coverage of the costs, arguing that it was an experimental treatment whose benefits were unproven and that it was therefore excluded under the terms of her policy. The insurer pressed her to get a second opinion from an Independent medical center. Fox refused—who were they to tell her to get another opinion? Her life was at stake. Raising $212,000 through charitable donations, she paid the costs of therapy herself, but it was delayed. She died eight months after the treatment. Her husband sued Health Net for bad faith, breach of contract, intentional infliction of emotional damage, and punitive damages and won. The jury awarded her estate $89 million. The HMO executives were branded killers. Ten states enacted laws requiring insurers to pay for bone marrow transplantation for breast cancer. Never mind that Health Net was right. Research ultimately showed the treatment to have no benefit for breast cancer patients and to actually worsen their lives. But the jury verdict shook the American insurance industry. Raising questions about doctors’ and patients’ treatment decisions in terminal illness was judged political suicide.
Atul Gawande (Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End)
If you’re Black or brown, the value of your life is less than the fragile masculinity of a cop who wants to feel superior or a racist who wants you out of the way so they’re not forced to face someone they don’t understand. El valor de tu vida es lo que vale el segundo en que alguien aprieta el gatillo, el segundo en que alguien pone toda su ira en su mano y te clava un cuchillo. Not enough? Think harder. The value of your life is zilch to most people. That’s why they sell you food that will kill you. That’s why they put poison in the water and don’t care if you get cancer. That’s why they allow you to rely on our shitty health system and allow insurance companies to deny you coverage based on a ridiculously long list of preexisting conditions, one of which is probably being alive.
Gabino Iglesias (The Devil Takes You Home)