The Hill reported this morning that many of the biggest healthcare interests in the country, including pharmaceutical companies and health insurers, have formed a coalition to fight single payer. The group, the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, includes major trade groups like “America’s Health Insurance…
The rapid emergence of Medicare for All as a mainstream proposal in the Democratic Party has been accompanied by that age-old question which is literally only asked of government programs designed to help poor and working class people: how are we going to pay for it?
My mother has lung cancer. At the end of last year, she began feeling breathless and tired, struggling with walks around the village I grew up in; in March, we found out a tumor was to blame.
Nothing says big profit margins like a massive health insurer buying up two large hospice chains to turn the business of dying with dignity into a moneymaking venture.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee—the group tasked with making sure Democrats win House races around the country—has a problem. You see, while Donald Trump and his cronies do everything in their power to dismantle anything even resembling reasonable healthcare legislation in the United States, the DCCC…
A new CBS poll says that if the 2018 midterm were held today, Democrats would win back a majority in the House—but just barely. Luckily for Democrats, that poll indicates a way to move the needle, and it doesn’t look like it’s the Russia investigation.
Remember Tom Price? That disgraced-preacher-lookin’, Disney turtle fella who used to Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services but resigned because he took flights on a whole slew of taxpayer-funded private jets? He comes roaring back into our collective consciousness today, rising from the nether-regions of…
Single payer has often been seen as a far-left radical view that does not comport with practical realities, especially in comparison to a much more moderate national healthcare program like the Affordable Care Act.
On April 1, the contract between Blue Cross Blue Shield and the Piedmont hospital system, which has over 100 locations around Georgia, expired, meaning those locations were now considered out-of-network for anyone with BCBS insurance. According to Piedmont, about 500,000 people with BCBS had seen a Piedmont provider…
Oh, a new report from the Congressional Budget Office finds that the Affordable Care Act redistributed an enormous amount of wealth—$16 billion annually—from the 1 percent to poor Americans?
The Michigan arm of the insurance company Blue Cross Blue Shield is asking its employees to donate to the campaign of Gretchen Whitmer, the top-funded Democrat in the race for governor, The Detroit News reported on Wednesday. One of her opponents, who has received nationwide media attention for his left-wing politics…
On Tuesday, former CMS administrator under Obama Andy Slavitt announced United States of Care, a “non-partisan non-profit” with undisclosed funding that plans on “building and mobilizing a movement to achieve long-lasting solutions that make health care better for everyone.”
This past weekend, Ralph Northam, the Democratic governor-elect of Virginia, gave an interview to the Washington Post in which he suggested instituting restrictions on Medicaid even as he promised to expand coverage. The key passage:
Think, for a moment, about how insanely fucked up the American healthcare system has to be in order for a victim of the Las Vegas massacre to utter this sentence while still recovering in his hospital bed: “Medical bills are astronomical these days...It’s a mountain that just doesn’t seem like it’s gonna be climbable,…
Perhaps the only more depressingly predictable, uniquely American thing than mass shootings are the spate of crowdfunding campaigns that (mostly) benevolent souls create to help cover the medical expenses of the survivors in the wake of such atrocities.
As I wrote at the beginning of this week’s series on the NHS, my first political experience happened when I was two or three, when Mum took me to a rally to defend the hospital where I was born. Since 1992, that maternity ward, along with other services like pediatric services and critical care, has been under threat.
All this week, Splinter is talking to healthcare experts about what advocates for a single payer system can learn from the National Health Service in my home country, the United Kingdom. Yesterday, we spoke with professor Martin McKee. Today, we’re talking with Rebecca Givan, an associate professor at the Center for…
The first time I ever appeared in the press it was not for something I wrote. It was a picture of my mum carrying me, about three years old, as she spoke at a rally to defend our local hospital, the Horton General in Banbury, Oxfordshire. For almost my entire life, the local authorities and the national governments,…
