Insurance reform is OK but we don’t need health care reform.
Conservative opponents of health care reform repeat this refrain in the blogosphere and the news.
Single payer advocates, on the other hand, insist they want health care reform, not insurance reform.
What is the difference? Are they mutually exclusive? Continue reading
When people think of HIPAA, they think of the privacy provisions of HIPAA. Yet privacy is nowhere in the title – the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, passed in 1997, was touted as a stake through the heart of one of the great evils of the health insurance market place – refusing to insure sick people. The practice is called medical underwriting.
“Portability”, the P in HIPAA, offered the promise that an individual undergoing treatment for a medical condition, would not have their treatment disrupted because of a “pre-existing condition” if they changed jobs and employer sponsored health plans.
HIPAA has the same elements described in my recent post about Michelle’s Law: a good story line and a very narrow focus. The Rube Goldberg fix over the simple, direct fix.
Anyone looking around at health care today might be surprised to learn that Congress even considered the subject. Continue reading
Every health care reform proposal attempts to offer some relief for small businesses. According to the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB), small businesses create 2/3 of American jobs, yet half of the uninsured are in small businesses.
Look at President-elect Obama’s health care proposal on his campaign’s web site. The first two items:
What’s remarkable about these proposals is that we are still discussing them. Continue reading