Our Health Policy Matters

Is the CLASS Act already dead and buried, a full year before it comes to life? A couple of months ago, I wrote a column about the ill-advised, bi-partisan Congressional effort by the Senate “Gang of Six” to deep-six the CLASS Act.   The CLASS Act is the new national privately-financed long term care insurance program authorized by Congress in 2010.   Without going into all the details again, it is intended to make long term care insurance care available to the working middle class.   This would take pressure off of the Medicaid program, resulting in billions of dollars of savings to taxpayers. The CLASS Act won’t even take effect until October, 2012, and the Administration hasn’t even announced exactly how it would be structured.   But the Department of Health and Human Services may be closing down the CLASS office.   This past weekend’s news report from the Hill and other media outlets noted that it has let its actuary go and asked the Senate not to appropriate $120 mil

“States’ rights” is as popular a rallying cry as ever as we enter the early stages of the 2012 election campaign.   To advocates of states’ rights, they are code words for state innovation and initiative, unhampered by the demands of a federal government.     In their minds, we are a United States of America.   To skeptics, we are a United States of America, and states’ rights are the code words of political leaders who want to run their states as fiefdoms and answer to no higher authority.   The new 2010 uninsured numbers released by the U.S. Census Bureau last week make a compelling case against the states’ rights position. In the South, where the drum roll for states’ rights beats most loudly, 19% of all people were uninsured 2010 for the entire year .   This was more than in the West, where 18% were uninsured, the Midwest, where 13% were uninsured, and the Northeast, where only 12% were uninsured. Place clearly matters where health insurance is concerned, and innovation a

The recent heavy-handed action by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida (BCBSFL) to terminate and amend all of its contracts with mental health providers brings to light a well-kept national health care financing secret. It is an American myth that we rely on private insurance companies to finance our healthcare delivery system.   America’s privately-financed private health insurance companies pay so small a share of the nation’s healthcare bill today that they could vanish tomorrow and we would barely notice anything but the cheering. Insurance companies have been marginalizing themselves by years of short-sighted actions against both providers and patients. They are well on the way to becoming little more than bundles of administrative costs and profits. And it may already be too late for them to do anything about it.  According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), our total U.S. health care expenditures in 2009 were just under $2.5 trillion .     Pr

A few weeks ago, we were tantalized by the news that a new treatment for leukemia might be on the horizon.   Three very sick patients were injected with a new drug.   It was made from – of all things – a modified version of the virus that causes AIDS.   After a year, two were disease-free and the third had a 70% reduction in disease tissue.   One researcher was quoted as saying that the results “exceeded our wildest expectations.” But the rest of the story pointed out that the discovery almost didn’t happen.   There wasn’t enough research money for a full trial.   Neither the National Cancer Institute nor pharmaceutical companies had funding for the research.   A family foundation stepped up, but that’s why there were only enough funds for three patients to participate initially. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the largest funder of biomedical research in the United States.   In requesting a budget of $32 billion for FY2012, it noted that research that it funded has r