As world events have come to dominate the news in America, health reform appears to have slipped from the front page. But in the backrooms of Capitol Hill and the White House, discussions are as furious as ever. On Christmas Eve, the Senate passed a healthcare reform bill, just as the House of Representatives had […]
Category: US healthcare
Vidhya Alakeson on Medicaid
Medicaid is typically thought of as the health insurance program for the poor. But when it was created in the 1960s, it was designed to cover only three low income groups: parents and children, older adults and individuals with disabilities. Single adults without a disability and without dependent children were left out. What this means […]
Vidhya Alakeson on the US Finance Committee bill
Few people outside of Washington have heard of Olympia Snowe, the senator from Maine. But on Tuesday, she became the most important person in healthcare reform. Her vote in the Senate Finance Committee gave the Obama Administration its first bipartisan victory on healthcare. […]
David Kerr: UK and US healthcare- public option is the universal, high quality, and efficient way
Writers of the open letter to America in defence of the NHS rebut clearly and concisely some of the more ludicrous charges leveled against our system of healthcare. It’s a debate that on the whole leaves me cold. The idea that wittingly a Government would allow a huge chunk of its population to go without proper healthcare […]
Vidhya Alakeson on President Obama’s healthcare speech
It is a peculiar trait of American politics: long presidential speeches broadcast at prime time. Just as Bill Clinton did thirteen years ago, yesterday, for an hour, President Obama tried to convince the American people that they had more to gain from healthcare reform than they had to lose. After a summer in which the […]
Stephen Ginn on US health care reform
I was out for dinner with a New Yorker friend of mine recently. She’s British, but she’d brought along an American friend and I happened to mention to him how much I was digging President Obama. Things deteriorated from there. “Obama is a socialist!” the heads of the rest of the table turned, as the […]
Richard Smith asks: Is it unpatriotic to criticise the NHS?
I’m worried that in the highly charged atmosphere created by the extraordinary US debate on health care my published anxieties about the NHS might brand me as unpatriotic. Perhaps Fox News or some equally evil, right wing American media outlet will track down my words in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine and broadcast […]
Vidhya Alakeson on the CLASS Act
As disability and aging advocacy groups continue to wait for the publication of the UK Government’s social care green paper, advocates on the other side of the Atlantic have been celebrating Obama’s show of support for the inclusion of social care reform as part of healthcare reform. Social care, or long term care as it […]
Vidhya Alakeson on affordable health choices in the US
An audible gasp went around Washington last week when the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its first estimate of the cost of healthcare reform: $1 trillion. The cost seemed all the more eye watering given that it would only cut the numbers of uninsured Americans by 16 million or around a third of the total […]
Vidhya Alakeson on the US stimulus bill
While Tom Daschle waits another week for his confirmation as the Secretary of Health and Human Services, health reform has got underway without him in the form of the stimulus bill. The bill that is currently working its way through Congress falls just short of $900 billion in tax cuts and spending. Principally, it is […]