Two powerful Bill Moyers' Journal shows

Gosh, I sure love PBS.

Interview with Wendell Potter former cheif of Public Relations for Cigna, the nation's 4th largest healthcare provider.

Trudy Lieberman, director of the health and medical reporting program at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, and Marcia Angell, senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School and former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Vanity Faire

In the current issue of Vanity Faire, Michael Lewis takes a look at AIG. It's a good read by a very good author.

Fearmongering

I love listening to all the fearful stories opponents have for health care reform:

"You don't want a bureaucrat between you and your Dr." Well, no, but I would rather have a bureaucrat than an underwriter or claims adjuster whose first priority is to reduce the cost of my treatment to the company's bottom line. Wait, isn't that a corporate bureaucrat? So what is the difference? Both are accountable to large groups of people. One group works on Wall Street. The other group works on Main Street. Which do you choose?

"Taxing the rich will hurt the economy, as it prevents investment." This is the classic supply-side economic argument as to why cutting taxes for the rich is the best idea EVER. As the past 30 years have shown, all this does is take more and more money and give it to the people that already have lots of money. Then these folks take this money and the do invest it, but its investing in more speculative areas and not tangible investment like jobs and whatnot. So then you get bubbles and crashes, like what we have seen and are currently experiencing. Supply-side economics might work if you are providing jobs that you can guarantee will not go away. That way, your employees fell secure in their jobs are are willing to spend more of their income on consumption. But when you have an economy where 70% relies on consumption, and your consumers are scared about job security and bills and they save their money, then the whole theory breaks down. Data is showing that taxing the rich won't hurt anybody. But of course, when you have lots of money, you want to keep it, and if that means you have to spend some of that money to buy your congress so that they don't tax you.

"Government should stay out of health care" Actually, the government pays more health care than the private industry through medicare and medicaid. But don't tell American citizens that.

Krugman on why markets can't fix healthcare

I would say you should read his post, but it's just too good not to quote in full:

Why markets can’t cure healthcare

Judging both from comments on this blog and from some of my mail, a significant number of Americans believe that the answer to our health care problems — indeed, the only answer — is to rely on the free market. Quite a few seem to believe that this view reflects the lessons of economic theory.

Not so. One of the most influential economic papers of the postwar era was Kenneth Arrow’s Uncertainty and the welfare economics of health care, which demonstrated — decisively, I and many others believe — that health care can’t be marketed like bread or TVs. Let me offer my own version of Arrow’s argument.

There are two strongly distinctive aspects of health care. One is that you don’t know when or whether you’ll need care — but if you do, the care can be extremely expensive. The big bucks are in triple coronary bypass surgery, not routine visits to the doctor’s office; and very, very few people can afford to pay major medical costs out of pocket.

This tells you right away that health care can’t be sold like bread. It must be largely paid for by some kind of insurance. And this in turn means that someone other than the patient ends up making decisions about what to buy. Consumer choice is nonsense when it comes to health care. And you can’t just trust insurance companies either — they’re not in business for their health, or yours.

This problem is made worse by the fact that actually paying for your health care is a loss from an insurers’ point of view — they actually refer to it as “medical costs.” This means both that insurers try to deny as many claims as possible, and that they try to avoid covering people who are actually likely to need care. Both of these strategies use a lot of resources, which is why private insurance has much higher administrative costs than single-payer systems. And since there’s a widespread sense that our fellow citizens should get the care we need — not everyone agrees, but most do — this means that private insurance basically spends a lot of money on socially destructive activities.

The second thing about health care is that it’s complicated, and you can’t rely on experience or comparison shopping. (”I hear they’ve got a real deal on stents over at St. Mary’s!”) That’s why doctors are supposed to follow an ethical code, why we expect more from them than from bakers or grocery store owners.

You could rely on a health maintenance organization to make the hard choices and do the cost management, and to some extent we do. But HMOs have been highly limited in their ability to achieve cost-effectiveness because people don’t trust them — they’re profit-making institutions, and your treatment is their cost.

Between those two factors, health care just doesn’t work as a standard market story.

All of this doesn’t necessarily mean that socialized medicine, or even single-payer, is the only way to go. There are a number of successful health-care systems, at least as measured by pretty good care much cheaper than here, and they are quite different from each other. There are, however, no examples of successful health care based on the principles of the free market, for one simple reason: in health care, the free market just doesn’t work. And people who say that the market is the answer are flying in the face of both theory and overwhelming evidence.

Obama on Health Care

I felt that last night's press conference went really well for Obama. I found myself agreeing with him a lot. The thing is, what he seems to want to do isn't really what congress is doing right now. All Congress is doing is just making it so that the 47 million people who aren't insured will be insured. We only have 'promises' and 'pledges' from the health care industry to reduce cost. I think that's a bunch of whooey. We need some legislation to mandate that costs are reduced. The least-sticky solution and probably the most difficult to pass is single payer. But that seems to be getting less and less likely. One thing that must be addressed in reform is how doctors get paid.

So on related news, after the CBO director's comments to Congress on how the current health care bills in Congress will increase costs, the CBO director was called to the White House to discuss options. Obama had a lot of people there with him, and leading Republicans are saying the meeting was just to intimidate the CBO director. The CBO director has posted an entry on his blog talking about the meeting. He claims that the meeting wasn't about intimidation but to discuss options about what to do, and he still remains objective on his job. What do you think?

So on Tuesday a report was posted saying that the Obama Administration used the same secrecy crap that Bush used to refused to detail who has visited the White House. In this case Obama was claiming that he didn't have to disclose who from the health care industry has visited the White House. I say that's a load of crap. What happened to all this promised transparency? Well, Obama reversed course today and released a list of health care industry representatives that have visited the White House. While this is better than Bush, why all the stupid run-around?

UPDATE: Great article on Minyanville about health care. Go read it.
David Brooks on health care in his NYT Op-Ed.

Ah, Steven Colbert

Funny clip on Single Payer

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Aaron Carroll
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Mark Sanford

BONUS: The New Republic on why taxing the rich will NOT stall the economy or hurt small business or do anything like what talk radio is saying will happen.

Apollo 11 launch in HD

These are some of the coolest Apollo videos I have ever seen

Apollo 11 Saturn V Launch (HD) Camera E-8 from Mark Gray on Vimeo.

Apollo 11 Lunar Landing from Mark Gray on Vimeo.

Apollo 11 First Steps on the Moon from Mark Gray on Vimeo.

NASA HD Apollo 11 Moonwalk Montage from jeyaganesh on Vimeo.

Apollo 11: For All Mankind from NASA Lunar Science Institute on Vimeo.