Kudos to Time Magazine and Stephen Brill who present this week a great comprehensive article about the flaws in our healthcare system:
Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us
(I thought Time Magazine content was behind a paywall, but I was able to access the article. Perhpas it is available for a limited time and disappears when it becomes an archive? Not sure. But do yourself a favor and head right over to the link above and read the article)
Find out how LOWERING the age of Medicare as opposed to the common wisdom of raising the age of Medicare will lower the arc of healthcare costs overall.
Brill points out how Medicare could be even MORE efficient if some of the self-imposed handcuffs Congress has placed on it due to the interference of lobbyists and self-interests were removed - like negotiating the costs of drugs (duh!)
He also discusses the inherent inequalities in our system - showing how exactly the same operation has varying costs depending on who is paying the bill.
Brill has been making the rounds of the talking head shows and it's lots of fun watching balloon heads like George Will's explode when presented with the facts about our healthcare system. This just happened on Stephanopoulis. Imagine a journalist from a mainstream media magazine going around and pointing out that fiscal prudence and savings are achieved by EXPANDING the safety net as opposed to cutting it!
The article and Brill also point out that Obama care does not re mediate or cure the underlying issues behind sky-rocketing health care costs.
A hundred diaries could be written using this article as a jumping off point. All I can say, is read it and send it along to everyone you can think of and lets start immediate improvement and expansion of the doors Obamacare opened -
1st order of business is opening up Medicare as the Public Option to anyone not covered by an employer policy, regardless of age. 2nd Order of business is allowing Medicare to negotiate drug costs as the other government health programs like Medicaid and the VA do.
And again, thank you to Stephen Brill for his work in publicizing widely what so many of us already know, but which has been confined primarily to the bloggosphere. He has provided a very powerful article to deploy in our battle for affordable and accessible healthcare for each and every American.