Pediatrician Donald M. Berwick, president emeritus and senior fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, is a lecturer and former faculty member at the Harvard Medical School and was administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in the Obama administration. At USA Today he writes—Stop fearmongering about 'Medicare for All.' Most families would pay less for better care:
With costs rising painfully, insurance companies denying care and nearly 30 million people still uninsured, America desperately needs an honest health policy discussion. That’s why it has been so disappointing over the past several weeks to watch multiple candidates parrot right-wing attacks on "Medicare for All," like claiming that it will greatly increase spending on health care or ringing alarms about raising taxes on the middle class.
The truth is the opposite: Medicare for All would sharply reduce overall spending on health care. It can be thoughtfully designed to reduce total costs for the vast majority of American families, while improving the quality of the care they get.
Over my career, I have witnessed the problems with our health care system firsthand. As a pediatrician, I have seen how our fragmented, expensive system hurts children and families. As a researcher at Harvard Medical School, I have studied the causes of waste and overspending in our system. And as President Barack Obama’s head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, I led the existing Medicare system and helped stand up Obamacare. [...]
Framing this debate by fearmongering over “higher taxes” ignores that this money is already coming out of American families’ pockets. Right now, these costs actually amount to a regressive tax that every family pays no matter whether their wage-earner is a CEO or a secretary. We can discuss whether a Medicare for All program that uses our money to fund Medicare instead of financing private insurance companies is a good idea. But it is deeply misleading to pretend that this shift is an increase in family health care costs. It is not.
And no one should buy the myth that Medicare for All represents a “government takeover of health care.” It does not. Medicare for All is about paying for care, not providing it. [...]
TOP COMMENTS
QUOTATION
"There are frightening implications for the future of our country if we do not impeach the president of the United States ... If we fail to impeach, we have donned and left unpunished a course of conduct totally inconsistent with reasonable expectations of the American people. The people of the United States are entitled to assume that their president is telling the truth. The pattern of misrepresentation and half-truths that emerges from our investigation reveals a presidential policy cynically based on the premise that the truth itself is negotiable."
~~Rep. M. Caldwell Butler, July 24, 1974 (Butler was a Republican from Virginia, and after making those remarks, he stated that he would vote to impeach Richard Nixon.)
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2010—An update from the front:
The war in Afghanistan? Not going all that well.
The war on drugs? Um, move along please.
The war on poverty? Are we still even fighting that one?
But don't despair. There is a battlefront where there's been significant progress—the war on reality.
In case you think that the general Tea Party lunatic positions on taxes, health care, and Aqua Buddha have distracted them from the battle lines of this engagement, Southern Fried Science has compiled a series of Tea Party statements where candidates and supporters reaffirm their allegiance to non-science. Whether it's O'Donnell's fury over mice with human brains, Sharron Angle's angle on the "hoax" of global warming, or the near universal disdain on the right for evolution, the Tea Party has not surrendered one inch to research and reason.
The editors of the journal Nature have declared that
The anti-science strain pervading the right wing in the United States is the last thing the country needs in a time of economic challenge. ... The [Tea Party] movement is also averse to science-based regulation, which it sees as an excuse for intrusive government.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: A teen pageant creeper, a military #dotard & a rambling dick walk into a bar. Bartender says, “The usual, Mr. Trump?” Spanish gov’t targets American caught with his nuts in a Catalan flag. Switzerland calls a referendum do-over, saying voters had faulty info.
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