As with his presidential campaign, Barack Obama’s approach to health reform will leave little to chance. His strategy for enacting the first major coverage expansion in more than 40 years is starting to take shape. He is building public support for reform early in the hope that it will be enough to counter the opponents of […]
Category: US healthcare
Vidhya Alakeson on Obama’s health team
If, like me, you’re used to a parliamentary system where the party with a majority in Parliament runs the government and, if it has a big enough majority, pushes through its manifesto commitments without too much difficulty, policy making in American can seem utterly chaotic. […]
Anna Donald’s American dream
I have just finished sobbing for hours over Barak Obama’s winning the US Presidency. I lived in Boston, Palo Alto (California), and Albany New York as a small child. My father a student on a scholarship, we camped all the way across the country and back. (What possessed my family to go south in summer […]
Vidhya Alakeson on the credit crunch and US health insurance
Banks, insurance companies and home owners have already fallen victim to the US financial crisis. Now healthcare is under fire. Last week, the state of Hawaii announced that it was ending Keiki Care, the only universal health insurance program for children in the United States. In the face of a projected deficit of $900 million […]
Vidhya Alakeson on parity for US mental health patients
Buried in last week’s legislation to bail out Wall Street was a small but important victory for healthcare in America. At the same time as passing a $700 billion rescue package for the financial sector last Friday, the US House of Representatives also passed a bill on mental health parity. Rumour has it that parity […]
Vidhya Alakeson: US presidential candidates’ health reform proposals
Yesterday, the Tax Policy Center released its initial analysis of the health reform plans of the two presidential campaigns. The center is a joint initiative of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, two leading Washington think tanks. […]
Vidhya Alakeson on the US election
After the Democratic Convention last week, when healthcare featured in almost every major speech, I had been waiting all week to see whether the Republicans would talk about it at all during their Convention in Minneapolis. Yesterday, on the last day of the Convention, healthcare reform finally got a mention when John McCain took to […]