Our Health Policy Matters

Are the 1994 AFC Champion San Diego Chargers a cursed team, or just a reflection of a growing trend toward chronic disease and early death in America? Led by running back Natrone Means and linebacker Junior Seau, the 1994 Chargers won the AFC West with a record of 11 wins and 5 losses, and beat the Miami Dolphins and Pittsburgh Steelers to reach the Super Bowl.  The 53 players on the active roster averaged 26 years of age. According to 1995 life expectancy tables , a 26 year old male could expect to live to the age 75. But when 42 year old Lew Bush – a linebacker on that Super Bowl team – died on December 9, 2011, he was the 7 th member of the team to die more than 30 years prematurely. Source:  ESPN Official 2011 Roster Information There is talk that these 1994 Chargers are cursed.  The first player to die, linebacker David Griggs, was 28 when his car slid off an expressway ramp in Ft. Lauderdale and crashed into a pole in June, 1995.   The second, running back

States’ Medicaid elephants are being dragged into the courts this year.  States had better be careful, or they just might get trampled under the weight of people they’ve failed to enroll. Last week, CT News Junkie reported the story of a class action lawsuit filed on behalf of almost 7,000 potential Medicaid recipients in Connecticut as of November 2011 whose applications were not processed within the 45 days mandated by federal law.   And Health News Florida, among others, reported that Florida’s Attorney General Pam Bondi filed a brief with the Supreme Court on behalf of twenty-six states (Connecticut is not one of them) alleging that Congress exceeds its authority when it “coerces states into accepting onerous conditions” of participation in the Medicaid program –even when it pays 90-100% of the costs of those provisions.  The two battles raise similar questions about how states avoid Medicaid costs today. The Supreme Court brief is supposed to be an argument a

“States and private markets, not the federal government, hold the key to improving our health care system.” Those are the words of Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, as he articulates his health reform vision on his campaign web site . U.S. health care costs are around $2.5 trillion. This money buys a lot of care, and pays a lot of salaries.  One out of every six workers in America relies on the health care industry for a paycheck.  Romney thinks that’s too big a cost for care. “At its core of this debate,” he writes (jarringly inarticulately for an official campaign web site), “is the question of what creates better patient outcomes and more efficiency: free enterprise and consumer-driven markets, or government management and regulation?” I realize that he wants us to answer “free enterprise and consumer-driven markets.” But in this case, that doesn’t happen to be true. The reasons why we have even a semblance of an affordable health care system in Ameri

With the Iowa caucuses finally behind us, the Presidential campaign of 2012 now begins in earnest, and will dominate our news and lives for the next year.   I predict we will hear words like "Obamacare," “Romneycare,” “government takeover,” and “individual mandate” (usually in sentences following the word “repeal”) until we can’t stand it anymore. If this is to be our fate in the New Year, then perhaps we can take some comfort in knowing that the debate probably won’t make a dime’s worth of difference about where most of us get our health care over the next few years or how we pay for it. This is because the 2010 Affordable Care Act and the individual mandate were not really health reform .   They were efforts to preserve health insurance as we know it, by getting more people who can afford it to purchase private insurance, and more who cannot onto the Medicaid public insurance program. So maybe we should take a minute between caucuses, primaries, and the general