By Evan Falchuk
Well, Jenny McCarthy. You know her, the actor and model who is sure she knows more about the medical science of autism than actual scientists. She spreads her sadly confused views through all kinds of channels.
Which brings us to Ezra Klein of the Washington Post.
By Evan Falchuk
Unconstitutional? How can the mandate to buy health insurance be unconstitutional?
It must be some kind of misguided resistance to progressivism. Or maybe it’s someone finally taking a stand against a power-grabbing government program.
But it’s actually about something else entirely.
And if you don’t know what it is, you won’t understand why the Virginia court ruled the way it did.
By Evan Falchuk
This is not a post about predicting the future.
I was asked to speak at the 25th anniversary celebration of the Dallas Fort Worth Business Group on Health. This group is one of a number of similar groups around the country that don’t get anywhere near the amount of attention and recognition they deserve.
And they should, because groups like this, and their leaders and participants, are building the future of American health care. (more…)
By Evan Falchuk
The government is remaking the health care system in order to pull money out of it.
So what do Americans do?
Look for ways to make money.
By Evan Falchuk
There’s a country with an unusual health care system.
In it, you often spend about as much time with your lawyer as you do your doctor. There are special courts set up to decide what kinds of treatment you are allowed to have. And doctors have to be careful that they don’t say or do the wrong thing, or else they risk being blackballed by insurance companies.
The country: the United States of America.
By Evan Falchuk
Did you know there actually is a “public option” in the health care reform law? It’s true – it’s called the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan, and it’s designed to cover people who who have been unable to get insurance because of a pre-existing condition. To hear the stories about how big of a problem this is in America, you’d think a product like this would be a big hit.
Except, it’s been a big flop.
By Evan Falchuk
On Fox’s Hannity (h/t The Corner), former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney defends the 2006 health care reform he championed. He is playing a losing hand by trying to claim it isn’t “similar” to the President Obama’s health care reform:
Romney: Well, obviously there are some similarities and there are some important differences as well. Maybe I’ll start with the intent: the intent of our legislation was to get health care to work like a market and the intent of the Obama bill, the Obamacare program, is to have government take over health care. Our bill was a state solution to a state problem within the rights of the Constitution. Obamacare is a federal intrusion of power, taking over the rights of states and the rights of families and the rights of doctors. It is a massive abuse of constitutional power and for that reason I think it needs to be repealed and we need to do a better job to get health care reformed in a way that makes it look more like a market.
There are some other differences of course – Obamacare raises taxes by half a trillion dollars, it cuts benefits to seniors on the private side of medicare by a half a trillion dollars. Of course we didn’t do anything like that. And ours was an experiment, there were some mistakes in it, there are things I’d do differently the second time around. But that last thing I’d ever do would be to take what we had done for one state and impose it on the entire nation. It is simply be unconstitutional, it’s bad policy, and it’s wrong. [sic]
By Evan Falchuk
You want to see a doctor?
You’re going to have to wait. And I don’t mean like an hour in the office.
I mean like 53 days.
By Evan Falchuk
David Williams, the Charlie Rose of the health care blogosphere, recently interviewed me.
You can listen to the audio of our wide-ranging talk on David’s always-interesting Health Business Blog.
We talked about health care reform, health IT, social media, health care quality, patient navigation, and the role of Best Doctors.
Give it a listen, and visit back to David’s blog regularly.
What’s your opinion on the subjects we talked about?
By Evan Falchuk
If a web site touted misleading health care information, you’d hope the government would do something about it. But what do you do when the government is the one feeding the public bad information?
